Learning to Navigate Under Imperfect Perception: Conformalised Segmentation for Safe Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Bethell, Daniel, Gerasimou, Simos, Calinescu, Radu, Imrie, Calum
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Bethell, Daniel
Gerasimou, Simos
Calinescu, Radu
Imrie, Calum
author_facet Bethell, Daniel
Gerasimou, Simos
Calinescu, Radu
Imrie, Calum
contents Reliable navigation in safety-critical environments requires both accurate hazard perception and principled uncertainty handling to strengthen downstream safety handling. Despite the effectiveness of existing approaches, they assume perfect hazard detection capabilities, while uncertainty-aware perception approaches lack finite-sample guarantees. We present COPPOL, a conformal-driven perception-to-policy learning approach that integrates distribution-free, finite-sample safety guarantees into semantic segmentation, yielding calibrated hazard maps with rigorous bounds for missed detections. These maps induce risk-aware cost fields for downstream RL planning. Across two satellite-derived benchmarks, COPPOL increases hazard coverage (up to 6x) compared to comparative baselines, achieving near-complete detection of unsafe regions while reducing hazardous violations during navigation (up to approx 50%). More importantly, our approach remains robust to distributional shift, preserving both safety and efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_18485
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to Navigate Under Imperfect Perception: Conformalised Segmentation for Safe Reinforcement Learning
Bethell, Daniel
Gerasimou, Simos
Calinescu, Radu
Imrie, Calum
Machine Learning
Reliable navigation in safety-critical environments requires both accurate hazard perception and principled uncertainty handling to strengthen downstream safety handling. Despite the effectiveness of existing approaches, they assume perfect hazard detection capabilities, while uncertainty-aware perception approaches lack finite-sample guarantees. We present COPPOL, a conformal-driven perception-to-policy learning approach that integrates distribution-free, finite-sample safety guarantees into semantic segmentation, yielding calibrated hazard maps with rigorous bounds for missed detections. These maps induce risk-aware cost fields for downstream RL planning. Across two satellite-derived benchmarks, COPPOL increases hazard coverage (up to 6x) compared to comparative baselines, achieving near-complete detection of unsafe regions while reducing hazardous violations during navigation (up to approx 50%). More importantly, our approach remains robust to distributional shift, preserving both safety and efficiency.
title Learning to Navigate Under Imperfect Perception: Conformalised Segmentation for Safe Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18485