arXiv:2509.12833cs.LG2025-09被引 5

对比两种安全强化学习方法,揭示其优劣与适用场景。

Safe Reinforcement Learning using Action Projection: Safeguard the Policy or the Environment?

  • 通过投影过滤器修正不安全动作,分环境防护与策略内防护两类。
  • 动作混淆导致梯度信息丢失,策略内方法受此影响更严重。
  • 提出新惩罚机制提升策略内方法性能,可超越改进后的环境防护法。

基于投影的安全过滤器通过将不安全动作映射到最近的可行替代动作来保障强化学习中的安全性。两种主流集成策略为:安全环境强化学习(SE-RL),将防护视为环境一部分;安全策略强化学习(SP-RL),通过可微优化层将防护嵌入策略中。尽管两者在关键任务中广泛应用,但缺乏理论比较。本文首次在演员-评论家框架下统一形式化两者,并分析其策略梯度估计差异。研究发现,动作混淆(多个不安全动作被投影至同一安全动作)会导致梯度信息损失。在SE-RL中,该效应由评论家隐式近似;而在SP-RL中,它表现为反向传播时雅可比矩阵秩亏。本文贡献包括:(i) 统一形式化;(ii) 理论分析梯度估计与动作混淆的影响;(iii) 对比缓解策略,提出一种新型惩罚项改进SP-RL,使其符合成熟SE-RL实践。实验验证理论预测:动作混淆对SP-RL损害更大,但经改进后,其性能可匹配甚至超越优化后的SE-RL。结果为依据任务特征选择与优化安全强化学习方法提供了切实指导。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Projection-based safety filters, which modify unsafe actions by mapping them to the closest safe alternative, are widely used to enforce safety constraints in reinforcement learning (RL). Two integration strategies are commonly considered: Safe environment RL (SE-RL), where the safeguard is treated as part of the environment, and safe policy RL (SP-RL), where it is embedded within the policy through differentiable optimization layers. Despite their practical relevance in safety-critical settings, a formal understanding of their differences is lacking. In this work, we present a theoretical comparison of SE-RL and SP-RL. We identify a key distinction in how each approach is affected by action aliasing, a phenomenon in which multiple unsafe actions are projected to the same safe action, causing information loss in the policy gradients. In SE-RL, this effect is implicitly approximated by the critic, while in SP-RL, it manifests directly as rank-deficient Jacobians during backpropagation through the safeguard. Our contributions are threefold: (i) a unified formalization of SE-RL and SP-RL in the context of actor-critic algorithms, (ii) a theoretical analysis of their respective policy gradient estimates, highlighting the role of action aliasing, and (iii) a comparative study of mitigation strategies, including a novel penalty-based improvement for SP-RL that aligns with established SE-RL practices. Empirical results support our theoretical predictions, showing that action aliasing is more detrimental for SP-RL than for SE-RL. However, with appropriate improvement strategies, SP-RL can match or outperform improved SE-RL across a range of environments. These findings provide actionable insights for choosing and refining projection-based safe RL methods based on task characteristics.

强化学习安全控制动作投影

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