通过联合建模奖励与安全的关联性,提升机器人控制的安全性和采样效率。
COP-Q: Safety-First Reinforcement Learning for Robot Control via Cholesky-Ordered Projection

- 将奖励与安全目标的不确定性联合建模,利用柯列斯基分解实现优先级排序
- 在Brax和Safety-Gymnasium上实现强安全性能,样本效率优于或媲美基线
- 方法轻量易集成,适合需高安全性的强化学习机器人应用
安全机器人控制需在满足安全约束的前提下最大化回报。现有离策略安全强化学习通常对奖励和安全的Q值分别使用独立的评论家集合,各自处理不确定性,忽略了目标间的相关性,导致价值估计过度保守,降低采样效率。为此,本文提出柯列斯基有序投影Q学习(COP-Q),将目标间协方差引入向量值Q值估计中,在联合Q值空间构建广义置信区间,并利用柯列斯基分解以序列形式编码目标优先级,既保持安全上的保守性,又自适应减少奖励目标的过度保守。该估计同时用于时序差分目标计算与演员优化。COP-Q计算开销极小,可无缝兼容主流深度Q学习框架。在Brax机器人运动和Safety-Gymnasium安全导航任务中的实验表明,无论硬约束还是软约束设置,COP-Q均实现优异的安全表现,并在样本效率上达到或超越代表性基线。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Safe robot control requires maximizing return while satisfying safety constraints. In off-policy safe reinforcement learning, reward and safety Q-values are commonly learned by separate critic ensembles, with uncertainty handled independently for each objective. This objective-wise treatment neglects inter-objective correlation and can lead to overly conservative value estimates, thereby reducing sample efficiency. To address this issue, we propose Cholesky-Ordered Projection Q-learning (COP-Q), a safety-first method that incorporates inter-objective covariance into vector-valued Q-value estimation. COP-Q constructs a generalized confidence bound in the joint Q-value space and uses Cholesky factorization to encode objective priority in a sequential form. This preserves conservatism on safety while adaptively reducing excessive conservatism on the reward objective. The resulting estimate is used in both temporal-difference target computation and actor optimization. COP-Q incurs minimal computational overhead and is readily compatible with most existing deep Q-learning frameworks. Experiments on robot locomotion in Brax and safe navigation in Safety-Gymnasium, covering both hard- and soft-safety settings, demonstrate that COP-Q achieves strong safety performance together with competitive or improved sample efficiency relative to representative baselines.
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