Dyna-Style Safety Augmented Reinforcement Learning: Staying Safe in the Face of Uncertainty
Artur Eisele, Bernd Frauenknecht, Friedrich Solowjow, Sebastian Trimpe
Abstract
Safety remains an open problem in reinforcement learning (RL), especially during training. While safety filters are promising to address safe exploration, they are generally poorly suited for high-dimensional systems with unknown dynamics. We propose Dyna-style Safety Augmented Reinforcement Learning (Dyna-SAuR), a novel algorithm that learns both a scalable safety filter and a control policy using a learned uncertainty-aware dynamics model, while requiring minimal domain knowledge. The filter avoids failures and high uncertainty regions. Thus, better models expand the set of safe and certain states, reducing filter conservatism. We present the effectiveness of Dyna-SAuR on goal-reaching CartPole as well as MuJoCo Walker, reducing failures compared to state-of-the-art methods by 2 orders of magnitude.
Topics
Classified with taxonomy v2 on Wed, 2 Sept 2026.