Towards Safe Reinforcement Learning via OOD Dynamics Detection in Autonomous Driving System (Student Abstract)

Abstract

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has proven effective in training agents to achieve goals in complex environments. However, a trained RL agent may exhibit, during deployment, unexpected behavior when faced with a situation where its state transitions differ even slightly from the training environment. Such a situation can arise for a variety of reasons. Rapid and accurate detection of anomalous behavior appears to be a prerequisite for using DRL in safety-critical systems, such as autonomous driving. We propose a novel OOD detection algorithm based on modeling the transition function of the training environment. Our method captures the bias of model behavior when encountering subtle changes of dynamics while maintaining a low false positive rate. Preliminary evaluations on the realistic simulator CARLA corroborate the relevance of our proposed method.