Safety-Regulated Transfer Reinforcement Learning with Adaptive Teacher Guidance

We propose Safety-Regulated Adaptive Transfer Reinforcement Learning (SRATRL), a teacher--student framework that combines safety-triggered intervention, safety-adaptive value shaping, and policy-compatibility-based optimization for efficient target-domain adaptation. First, a safety-triggered closed-loop intervention strategy is developed that activates teacher guidance according to the instantaneous safety cost and adaptively adjusts the intervention threshold based on the student policy's recent safety performance, thereby providing timely safety supervision while progressively restoring student autonomy as its safety improves. Next, a safety-adaptive teacher-guided value-shaping scheme is introduced, in which a teacher-consistency signal is incorporated into the critic target, and its contribution is dynamically regulated by the safety-constraint multiplier, enabling stronger teacher guidance under elevated safety risks and gradually weakening such guidance as the safety constraint is better satisfied. In addition, a teacher-student policy-compatibility weighting approach is proposed to alleviate the adverse optimization effects caused by policy mismatch. It reweights teacher-intervened transitions according to the relative likelihood of the executed action under the teacher and student policies, thereby improving policy-update stability. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with a Proximal Policy Optimization with Lagrangian constraint baseline, the proposed method improves the average velocity by 6.90%, and reduces the crash ratio by 75.00%. These results demonstrate that the proposed method can reduce safety costs while maintaining competitive task efficiency.