COP-Q: Safety-First Reinforcement Learning for Robot Control via Cholesky-Ordered Projection
Safe robot control requires maximizing return while satisfying safety constraints. In off-policy safe reinforcement learning, reward and safety Q-values are commonly learned by separate critic ensembles, with uncertainty handled independently for each objective. This objective-wise treatment neglects inter-objective correlation and can lead to overly conservative value estimates, thereby reducing sample efficiency. To address this issue, we propose Cholesky-Ordered Projection Q-learning (COP-Q), a safety-first method that incorporates inter-objective covariance into vector-valued Q-value estimation. COP-Q constructs a generalized confidence bound in the joint Q-value space and uses Choles...
| Authors | Guopeng Li, Moritz A. Zanger, Matthijs T. J. Spaan et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.RO |
| Published | 3 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 June 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.