Revisiting Safe Exploration in Safe Reinforcement learning

Abstract

Safe reinforcement learning (SafeRL) extends standard reinforcement learning with the idea of safety, where safety is typically defined through the constraint of the expected cost return of a trajectory being below a set limit. However, this metric fails to distinguish how costs accrue, treating infrequent severe cost events as equal to frequent mild ones, which can lead to riskier behaviors and result in unsafe exploration. We introduce a new metric, expected maximum consecutive cost steps (EMCC), which addresses safety during training by assessing the severity of unsafe steps based on their consecutive occurrence. This metric is particularly effective for distinguishing between prolonged and occasional safety violations. We apply EMMC in both on- and off-policy algorithm for benchmarking their safe exploration capability. Finally, we validate our metric through a set of benchmarks and propose a new lightweight benchmark task, which allows fast evaluation for algorithm design.