Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are increasingly deployed in safety-critical domains such as robotics, autonomous driving, and drone control, where unexpected behaviors may lead to severe real-world consequences. Fuzz testing has recently emerged as a promising method for exploring the vast state spaces of RL agents and exposing crashes. Although numerous RL fuzzing methods have been proposed, existing studies often differ in evaluation settings, baselines, and metrics, making it difficult to draw reliable conclusions about their relative effectiveness and practical usefulness. To address this gap, we present the first comprehensive empirical study that systematically evaluates RL fuzzing methods from four complementary perspectives: effectiveness, diversity, efficiency, and practical utility. We benchmark five state-of-the-art methods alongside random testing under unified configurations across three environments of increasing complexity (MountainCar, BipedalWalker, and CARLA), and further assess the downstream usefulness of detected crashes for agent robustness improvement and safety monitoring. Our results reveal several key insights. For instance,throughput-oriented methods like MDPFuzz demonstrate superior effectiveness and efficiency in crash discovery, while methods explicitly designed to encourage exploration like SeqDivFuzz excel at uncovering diverse crash behaviors. We also show that fuzzing-generated crashes can meaningfully improve agent robustness and enable accurate safety monitoring with strong cross-method generalization. Beyond these empirical findings, we distill actionable guidance for both researchers and practitioners, highlighting the benefits of combining complementary fuzzing strategies and adopting multi-level diversity analysis to achieve more comprehensive and practical RL testing.
We study robust peak-cost constrained reinforcement learning (RP-CRL), where the objective is to maximize expected reward while controlling the maximum cost encountered along a trajectory. This setting is motivated by safety-critical applications in which a single large violation can be catastrophic and therefore cannot be adequately captured by the standard CMDP framework based on expected cumulative cost. Existing reachability-constrained RL methods adopt Lagrangian-based approaches, yet the underlying duality properties of peak-cost constrained MDPs remain unclear. We show that, unlike standard CMDPs, peak-cost constrained MDPs may not admit zero duality gap. We further consider a robust formulation to address simulator-to-real-world mismatch in the transition dynamics. To solve this problem, we develop a surrogate optimization framework and a robust value estimation method based on integral probability metrics. We prove that, with appropriate hyperparameter choices, the surrogate solution attains the same robust reward value as the original problem while violating the constraint by at most epsilon. Experiments show that the proposed method effectively enforces safety under dynamics perturbations while retaining strong reward performance.