RAVE: Enabling safety verification for realistic deep reinforcement learning systems

Wenbo Guo, Taesung Lee, Kevin Eykholt, Jiyong Jiang

Keywords: Deep reinforcement learning; Safety verification

Abstract: Recent advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) expedited its success across a wide range of decision-making problems. However, a lack of safety guarantees restricts its use in critical tasks. While recent work has proposed several verification techniques to provide such guarantees, they require that the state-transition function be known and the reinforcement learning policy be deterministic. Both of these properties may not be true in real environments, which significantly limits the use of existing verification techniques. In this work, we propose two approximation strategies that address the limitation of prior work allowing the safety verification of RL policies. We demonstrate that by augmenting state-of-the-art verification techniques with our proposed approximation strategies, we can guarantee the safety of non-deterministic RL policies operating in environments with unknown state-transition functions. We theoretically prove that our technique guarantees the safety of an RL policy at runtime. Our experiments on three representative RL tasks empirically verify the efficacy of our method in providing a safety guarantee to a target agent while maintaining its task execution performance.

Submission Number: 5