Conditional Sequence Modeling for Safe Reinforcement Learning

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies from a fixed dataset while maximizing performance under cumulative cost constraints. In practice, deployment requirements often vary across scenarios, necessitating a single policy capable of zero-shot adaptation to different cost thresholds. However, most existing offline safe RL methods are trained under a pre-specified threshold, yielding policies with limited generalization and deployment flexibility across cost thresholds. Motivated by recent progress in conditional sequence modeling (CSM), which enables flexible goal-conditioned control by specifying target returns, we propose Return–Cost Regularized Constrained Decision Transformer (RCDT), a CSM-based method that supports zero-shot deployment across multiple cost thresholds within a single trained policy. RCDT is the first CSM-based offline safe RL algorithm that integrates a Lagrangian-style cost penalty with an auto-adaptive penalty coefficient. To avoid overly conservative behavior and achieve a more favorable return–cost trade-off, a reward–cost-aware trajectory reweighting mechanism and Q-value regularization are further incorporated. Extensive experiments on the DSRL benchmark demonstrate that RCDT consistently improves return–cost trade-offs over representative baselines.

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Publication Details

Journal
Mathematics
Published
2026-03-17
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/math14061015
Primary Topic
Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

Conditional Sequence Modeling for Safe Reinforcement Learning

Mathematics
Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
article

Conditional Sequence Modeling for Safe Reinforcement Learning

article en

Abstract

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies from a fixed dataset while maximizing performance under cumulative cost constraints. In practice, deployment requirements often vary across scenarios, necessitating a single policy capable of zero-shot adaptation to different cost thresholds. However, most existing offline safe RL methods are trained under a pre-specified threshold, yielding policies with limited generalization and deployment flexibility across cost thresholds. Motivated by recent progress in conditional sequence modeling (CSM), which enables flexible goal-conditioned control by specifying target returns, we propose Return–Cost Regularized Constrained Decision Transformer (RCDT), a CSM-based method that supports zero-shot deployment across multiple cost thresholds within a single trained policy. RCDT is the first CSM-based offline safe RL algorithm that integrates a Lagrangian-style cost penalty with an auto-adaptive penalty coefficient. To avoid overly conservative behavior and achieve a more favorable return–cost trade-off, a reward–cost-aware trajectory reweighting mechanism and Q-value regularization are further incorporated. Extensive experiments on the DSRL benchmark demonstrate that RCDT consistently improves return–cost trade-offs over representative baselines.

MathematicsVol. 14(6)
Zhejiang Institute of Science and Technology Information (CN), Zhejiang University of Technology (CN), Zhejiang University (CN)
Peace, Justice and strong institutions
Openalex Percentile: Top 23%
Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
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