Conformal Safety Shielding for Imperfect-Perception Agents

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Scarbro, William, Imrie, Calum, Yaman, Sinem Getir, Fatehi, Kavan, Pasareanu, Corina S., Calinescu, Radu, Mangal, Ravi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Scarbro, William
Imrie, Calum
Yaman, Sinem Getir
Fatehi, Kavan
Pasareanu, Corina S.
Calinescu, Radu
Mangal, Ravi
author_facet Scarbro, William
Imrie, Calum
Yaman, Sinem Getir
Fatehi, Kavan
Pasareanu, Corina S.
Calinescu, Radu
Mangal, Ravi
contents We consider the problem of safe control in discrete autonomous agents that use learned components for imperfect perception (or more generally, state estimation) from high-dimensional observations. We propose a shield construction that provides run-time safety guarantees under perception errors by restricting the actions available to an agent, modeled as a Markov decision process, as a function of the state estimates. Our construction uses conformal prediction for the perception component, which guarantees that for each observation, the predicted set of estimates includes the actual state with a user-specified probability. The shield allows an action only if it is allowed for all the estimates in the predicted set, resulting in local safety. We also articulate and prove a global safety property of existing shield constructions for perfect-perception agents bounding the probability of reaching unsafe states if the agent always chooses actions prescribed by the shield. We illustrate our approach with a case-study of an experimental autonomous system that guides airplanes on taxiways using high-dimensional perception DNNs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_17275
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Conformal Safety Shielding for Imperfect-Perception Agents
Scarbro, William
Imrie, Calum
Yaman, Sinem Getir
Fatehi, Kavan
Pasareanu, Corina S.
Calinescu, Radu
Mangal, Ravi
Systems and Control
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
We consider the problem of safe control in discrete autonomous agents that use learned components for imperfect perception (or more generally, state estimation) from high-dimensional observations. We propose a shield construction that provides run-time safety guarantees under perception errors by restricting the actions available to an agent, modeled as a Markov decision process, as a function of the state estimates. Our construction uses conformal prediction for the perception component, which guarantees that for each observation, the predicted set of estimates includes the actual state with a user-specified probability. The shield allows an action only if it is allowed for all the estimates in the predicted set, resulting in local safety. We also articulate and prove a global safety property of existing shield constructions for perfect-perception agents bounding the probability of reaching unsafe states if the agent always chooses actions prescribed by the shield. We illustrate our approach with a case-study of an experimental autonomous system that guides airplanes on taxiways using high-dimensional perception DNNs.
title Conformal Safety Shielding for Imperfect-Perception Agents
topic Systems and Control
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17275