Beyond Hard Constraints: Budget-Conditioned Reachability For Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Brahmanage, Janaka Chathuranga, Kumar, Akshat
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Brahmanage, Janaka Chathuranga
Kumar, Akshat
author_facet Brahmanage, Janaka Chathuranga
Kumar, Akshat
contents Sequential decision making using Markov Decision Process underpins many realworld applications. Both model-based and model free methods have achieved strong results in these settings. However, real-world tasks must balance reward maximization with safety constraints, often conflicting objectives, that can lead to unstable min/max, adversarial optimization. A promising alternative is safety reachability analysis, which precomputes a forward-invariant safe state, action set, ensuring that an agent starting inside this set remains safe indefinitely. Yet, most reachability based methods address only hard safety constraints, and little work extends reachability to cumulative cost constraints. To address this, first, we define a safetyconditioned reachability set that decouples reward maximization from cumulative safety cost constraints. Second, we show how this set enforces safety constraints without unstable min/max or Lagrangian optimization, yielding a novel offline safe RL algorithm that learns a safe policy from a fixed dataset without environment interaction. Finally, experiments on standard offline safe RL benchmarks, and a real world maritime navigation task demonstrate that our method matches or outperforms state of the art baselines while maintaining safety.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_22292
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Hard Constraints: Budget-Conditioned Reachability For Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning
Brahmanage, Janaka Chathuranga
Kumar, Akshat
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Sequential decision making using Markov Decision Process underpins many realworld applications. Both model-based and model free methods have achieved strong results in these settings. However, real-world tasks must balance reward maximization with safety constraints, often conflicting objectives, that can lead to unstable min/max, adversarial optimization. A promising alternative is safety reachability analysis, which precomputes a forward-invariant safe state, action set, ensuring that an agent starting inside this set remains safe indefinitely. Yet, most reachability based methods address only hard safety constraints, and little work extends reachability to cumulative cost constraints. To address this, first, we define a safetyconditioned reachability set that decouples reward maximization from cumulative safety cost constraints. Second, we show how this set enforces safety constraints without unstable min/max or Lagrangian optimization, yielding a novel offline safe RL algorithm that learns a safe policy from a fixed dataset without environment interaction. Finally, experiments on standard offline safe RL benchmarks, and a real world maritime navigation task demonstrate that our method matches or outperforms state of the art baselines while maintaining safety.
title Beyond Hard Constraints: Budget-Conditioned Reachability For Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22292