Seeing Before Colliding: Anticipatory Safe RL with Frozen Vision-Language Models
The cost signal that constrained-RL algorithms optimize against is almost always reactive: the simulator emits a non-zero cost only after a collision has begun, and the Lagrange multiplier of PPO-Lagrangian grows only after the episode budget has been exceeded. At race speeds, where collisions are instantaneous and irreversible, any safety mechanism that waits for cost to accumulate is structurally too late. We present VLM-Safe-RL, a framework that integrates a frozen vision-language model into the CMDP Lagrangian update as an anticipatory cost term. The framework comprises four contributions: (i) Decoupled Dual-Path CLIP, independent reward/cost paths that respect the CMDP's factorizatio...
| Authors | Samuel Tetteh, Cody Fleming |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 9 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 June 2026 |
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