Lyapunov-based uncertainty-aware safe reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown a promising performance in learning optimal policies for a variety of sequential decision-making tasks. However, in many real-world RL problems, besides optimizing the main objectives, the agent is expected to satisfy a certain level of safety (e.g., avoiding collisions in autonomous driving). While RL problems are commonly formalized as Markov decision processes (MDPs), safety constraints are incorporated via constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs). Although recent advances in safe RL have enabled learning safe policies in CMDPs, these safety requirements should be satisfied during both training and in the deployment process. Furthermore, it is shown that in memory-based and partially observable environments, these methods fail to maintain safety over unseen out-of-distribution observations. To address these limitations, we propose a Lyapunov-based uncertainty-aware safe RL model. The introduced model adopts a Lyapunov function that converts trajectory-based constraints to a set of local linear constraints. Furthermore, to ensure the safety of the agent in highly uncertain environments, an uncertainty quantification method is developed that enables identifying risk-averse actions through estimating the probability of constraint violations. Moreover, a Transformers model is integrated to provide the agent with memory to process long time horizons of information via the self-attention mechanism. The proposed model is evaluated in grid-world navigation tasks where safety is defined as avoiding static and dynamic obstacles in fully and partially observable environments. The results of these experiments show a significant improvement in the performance of the agent both in achieving optimality and satisfying safety constraints.