cs.ROSep 14, 2026

ResSafe: Learning Safety Filtering with Residual Reinforcement Learning for Humanoids

Authors: Gechen QuTong ZhangBike ZhangYen-Jen WangKoushil SreenathClaire TomlinJason Jangho Choi

Organizations: University of California, Berkeley · University of California, Los Angeles

Abstract

Safe control of humanoid robots remains challenging due to their high-dimensional dynamics, contact-rich interactions, and sensitivity to disturbances. Although reinforcement learning has enabled effective locomotion and motion tracking, learned policies can still generate unsafe actions that lead to instability or falls. In this work, we propose residual reinforcement learning as an implicit safety-filtering mechanism for safe humanoid control. Instead of relying on a single nominal policy to simultaneously balance performance, safety, and robustness, we decouple performance and safety. The nominal policy focuses solely on task performance, while a residual policy learns safety corrections. This decoupling leads to a better performance--safety Pareto trade-off and avoids the need for careful tuning of multiple competing reward terms within a single policy training. We show that the residual policy can act as an implicit safety filter.

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