Safe Control using Learned Safety Filters and Adaptive Conformal Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Huriot, Sacha, Tabbara, Ihab, Sibai, Hussein
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Huriot, Sacha
Tabbara, Ihab
Sibai, Hussein
author_facet Huriot, Sacha
Tabbara, Ihab
Sibai, Hussein
contents Safety filters have been shown to be effective tools to ensure the safety of control systems with unsafe nominal policies. To address scalability challenges in traditional synthesis methods, learning-based approaches have been proposed for designing safety filters for systems with high-dimensional state and control spaces. However, the inevitable errors in the decisions of these models raise concerns about their reliability and the safety guarantees they offer. This paper presents Adaptive Conformal Filtering (ACoFi), a method that combines learned Hamilton-Jacobi reachability-based safety filters with adaptive conformal inference. Under ACoFi, the filter dynamically adjusts its switching criteria based on the observed errors in its predictions of the safety of actions. The range of possible safety values of the nominal policy's output is used to quantify uncertainty in safety assessment. The filter switches from the nominal policy to the learned safe one when that range suggests it might be unsafe. We show that ACoFi guarantees that the rate of incorrectly quantifying uncertainty in the predicted safety of the nominal policy is asymptotically upper bounded by a user-defined parameter. This gives a soft safety guarantee rather than a hard safety guarantee. We evaluate ACoFi in a Dubins car simulation and a Safety Gymnasium environment, empirically demonstrating that it significantly outperforms the baseline method that uses a fixed switching threshold by achieving higher learned safety values and fewer safety violations, especially in out-of-distribution scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_18482
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Safe Control using Learned Safety Filters and Adaptive Conformal Inference
Huriot, Sacha
Tabbara, Ihab
Sibai, Hussein
Systems and Control
Machine Learning
Robotics
Safety filters have been shown to be effective tools to ensure the safety of control systems with unsafe nominal policies. To address scalability challenges in traditional synthesis methods, learning-based approaches have been proposed for designing safety filters for systems with high-dimensional state and control spaces. However, the inevitable errors in the decisions of these models raise concerns about their reliability and the safety guarantees they offer. This paper presents Adaptive Conformal Filtering (ACoFi), a method that combines learned Hamilton-Jacobi reachability-based safety filters with adaptive conformal inference. Under ACoFi, the filter dynamically adjusts its switching criteria based on the observed errors in its predictions of the safety of actions. The range of possible safety values of the nominal policy's output is used to quantify uncertainty in safety assessment. The filter switches from the nominal policy to the learned safe one when that range suggests it might be unsafe. We show that ACoFi guarantees that the rate of incorrectly quantifying uncertainty in the predicted safety of the nominal policy is asymptotically upper bounded by a user-defined parameter. This gives a soft safety guarantee rather than a hard safety guarantee. We evaluate ACoFi in a Dubins car simulation and a Safety Gymnasium environment, empirically demonstrating that it significantly outperforms the baseline method that uses a fixed switching threshold by achieving higher learned safety values and fewer safety violations, especially in out-of-distribution scenarios.
title Safe Control using Learned Safety Filters and Adaptive Conformal Inference
topic Systems and Control
Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18482