Safety by Design: Realized-Cost Constraints for Contextual Bandits with Continuous Actions

Contextual bandits are a standard framework for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, with applications in clinical trials, dosage selection, recommendation systems, and autonomous systems. Safety is central in many of these applications, since a single unsafe decision in settings such as dosage selection or autonomous driving can have catastrophic consequences. A common way to model safety in bandit problems is to associate each action with both a reward signal and a cost signal, and to optimize reward subject to constraints on cost. Most existing safety-constrained bandit models enforce safety by requiring the expected cost of each action to remain below a prescribed threshold. However, this may be insufficient in heteroscedastic settings, where the chosen action affects not only the expected reward and cost, but also the variability of the observed outcomes. We study contextual bandits with one-dimensional continuous actions and stage-wise high-probability constraints on the realized cost. We propose High-Probability Constrained UCB, an optimistic-pessimistic algorithm that explores for reward while conservatively estimating the safe action set. For linear reward and cost models, we prove a tight $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d\sqrt{T})$ regret bound, and we extend the analysis to general function classes using the eluder dimension. Experiments show that enforcing realized-cost safety substantially reduces violations compared with expected-cost constrained baselines.

Adjustment Speed as a Safety Constraint for Nonstationary Reinforcement Learning

Ensuring safety in reinforcement learning under nonstationarity requires determining whether a learning system can safely adapt to forecasted environmental change within the required recovery horizon. Existing safe reinforcement learning methods typically assume stationary environments and do not explicitly consider adaptation speed as a safety concern. However, when environments evolve over time, delayed adaptation may result in transient unsafe behavior. This paper proposes adjustment speed as a safety constraint for nonstationary reinforcement learning. The central idea is to define safety in terms of adaptation feasibility: future states or regions may become unsafe when the adaptation required to remain safe exceeds the learning system's calibrated recovery capacity. The proposed framework uses learned context representations and short-horizon context forecasts to estimate adaptation demand and compare it with the agent's achievable adaptation capacity. When predicted adaptation demand exceeds the calibrated recovery capacity, the framework proactively tightens the admissible action set and activates an action-level shield to reduce unsafe behavior before violations occur. Experiments in a nonstationary driving environment show that the proposed approach primarily reduces safety violations in short-horizon windows aligned with context changes. Ablation studies further show that shielding is more conservative for peak- and tail-risk suppression, while optimization-level adjustment provides additional reductions in short-horizon switch-conditioned violations. These results support adaptation feasibility as a practical safety principle for reinforcement learning under nonstationarity and demonstrate that proactive intervention can improve safety during periods of environmental change.

Safe and Generalizable Hierarchical Multi-Agent RL via Constraint Manifold Control

Multi-agent systems are widely used in safety-critical applications that require coordinated behavior under strict safety constraints. Existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off: learning-based methods achieve strong empirical performance but lack theoretical safety guarantees, while control-theoretic methods enforce safety but often lead to overly conservative and inefficient behaviors. We propose a hierarchical multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that enforces hard safety constraints under mild assumptions at low level via a constraint manifold, while enabling effective coordination through high-level policy learning. Our approach provides theoretical safety guarantees in the multi-agent setting and yields stationary learning dynamics, thereby enabling stable and efficient training. Empirically, our method achieves competitive performance while maintaining nearly perfect safety rates, and generalizes effectively to varying numbers of agents and obstacles.

Safety-Contract Graph Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Network Security Response

Autonomous network-security response systems promise to reduce Security Operations Centre (SOC) reaction latency, but reward-only multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) can improve security reward while remaining non-deployable. We present a safety-contract graph MARL framework and instantiate it as ACD$^3$-GAT (Adaptive Constrained Counterfactual Decisioning with a Graph Attention Network encoder), an architecture that separates simulator observations from reusable operational budgets, constrained optimization, graph state encoding, and counterfactual action screening. We evaluate the method in CAGE Challenge 4, where agents operate under budgets for Mean Time to Recover (MTTR), false-positive response, and firewall change-management disruption. Across the benchmark, every unconstrained method violates the SOC downtime budget in 100% of evaluated episodes, with mean downtime proxy costs of 311-430 against a budget of 50. This complements prior CAGE Challenge 4 findings by showing that reward-only learning lacks operational discipline. Constrained MAPPO-GAT (C-MAPPO-GAT) isolates Lagrangian operational-cost control and budget-aware screening, while ACD$^3$-GAT adds budget context, CVaR tail-risk estimation, opponent-belief state, and Graph Counterfactual Risk Propagation (G-CRP). The replicated comparison includes three 200-episode seeds for IPPO, MAPPO-GAT, C-MAPPO-GAT, and ACD$^3$-GAT. C-MAPPO-GAT reduces downtime violation from 100% to 0.3% and mean downtime cost from 355.4 to 15.5 relative to MAPPO-GAT. ACD$^3$-GAT reduces mean downtime cost to 48.2 with a 13.8% violation rate, placing it on the safety-contract frontier rather than at the most conservative compliance point. Topology-seed and coupled adaptive Red-process stress tests preserve this contrast and show lower worst adaptive degradation for safety-constrained policies than reward-only MAPPO-GAT.