Beyond Safe Execution: Safe Online Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving with Value Calibration and Adaptive Guidance

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) seeks reward-maximizing policies from static datasets under strict safety constraints. Existing methods often rely on soft expected-cost objectives or iterative generative inference, which can be insufficient for safety-critical real-time control. We propose Safe Flow Q-Learning (SafeFQL), which extends FQL to safe offline RL by combining a Hamilton--Jacobi reachability-inspired safety value function with an efficient one-step flow policy. SafeFQL learns the safety value via a self-consistency Bellman recursion, trains a flow policy by behavioral cloning, and distills it into a one-step actor for reward-maximizing safe action selection without rejection sampling at deployment. Empirically, SafeFQL trades modestly higher offline training cost for substantially lower inference latency than diffusion-style safe generative baselines, which is advantageous for real-time safety-critical deployment. Across boat navigation, and Safety Gymnasium MuJoCo tasks, SafeFQL matches or exceeds prior offline safe RL performance while substantially reducing constraint violations.

Safe online reinforcement learning requires policies to respect safety constraints while maintaining smooth optimization dynamics. Existing approaches typically rely on either strict safety enforcement via action interventions, which introduce discontinuities in system interaction and learning, or soft safety constraint formulations, which preserve smooth learning but provide limited safety assurance. We propose AutoSafe, a safety-aware policy architecture that integrates structured safety monitoring and intervention directly into the action generation process. This design enables smooth, risk-dependent transitions between performance-driven and safety-preserving behaviors, resulting in continuous online interaction and learning dynamics. Empirical results across a suite of continuous-control benchmarks demonstrate strong safety enforcement without sacrificing learning smoothness. We further validate AutoSafe on a physical cart-pole system, highlighting its practical effectiveness for safe online learning in the real world.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising performance in autonomous driving, yet ensuring the safety of online RL policies remains challenging due to insufficient exposure to safety-critical driving scenes. The long-tailed nature of real-world traffic situations makes dangerous and rare interactions difficult to encounter through conventional sampling, limiting the ability of RL policies to learn robust safety behaviors. Existing methods improve training diversity by synthesizing challenging scenes or adversarial situations. However, these approaches typically optimize scene generation objectives separately from the evolving policy, without explicitly modeling how generated perturbations relate to the current policy's weaknesses and learning needs. In this paper, we propose Threat-guided Policy-aware Scene Perturbation (TPSP) for safe autonomous driving with online RL. TPSP introduces a policy-aware scene encoder to capture the interaction between policy behaviors and surrounding environments, enabling scene perturbation aligned with the current policy. Based on this representation, TPSP selectively perturbs critical objects rather than applying uniform modifications across the scene. Furthermore, we develop a threat-guided optimization strategy that evaluates perturbed scenes through threat-level differences between policy rollouts on original and perturbed scenes, guiding the generation of safety-critical scenes with higher training value. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that TPSP improves safety learning efficiency, achieving strong safety performance on NAVSIM v2 with approximately 4 million kilometers of simulated driving data. Ablation studies verify that policy-aware targeted perturbations provide more informative safety-critical experiences than random or policy-unaware strategies, enabling safer driving under limited interaction budgets.