Abstract
We investigate the problem of scaling safe reinforcement learning (safe RL) to massively parallel training regimes, where a large number of environments are exe- cuted with short rollout horizons. Although this setting improves data throughput and wall-clock efficiency, it creates a mismatch with constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), whose safety constraints are defined over full-episode cost returns. We address this mismatch by analyzing staggered environment resets as a phase-mixture distribution over short trajectory segments. This analysis charac- terizes the bias induced by phase coverage and motivates a phase-aggregated cost estimator that reconstructs episode-level cost estimates from short rollout batches. We further incorporate finite-sample uncertainty and distribution mismatch into a constraint-tightening framework, yielding a scalable Safe RL method compatible with on-policy optimization. Using an MJX-based implementation of Safety Gym, our experiments show that the proposed method achieves performance comparable to non-massively parallel implementations while substantially reducing wall-clock training time.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08273
