Mumuksh Tayal

Mumuksh Tayal, Manan Tayal, Aditya Singh et al.

Ensuring safety in autonomous systems requires controllers that satisfy hard, state-wise constraints without relying on online interaction. While existing Safe Offline RL methods typically enforce soft expected-cost constraints, they do not guarantee forward invariance. Conversely, Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide rigorous safety guarantees but usually depend on expert-designed barrier functions or full knowledge of the system dynamics. We introduce Value-Guided Offline Control Barrier Functions (V-OCBF), a framework that learns a neural CBF entirely from offline demonstrations. Unlike prior approaches, V-OCBF does not assume access to the dynamics model; instead, it derives a recursive finite-difference barrier update, enabling model-free learning of a barrier that propagates safety information over time. Moreover, V-OCBF incorporates an expectile-based objective that avoids querying the barrier on out-of-distribution actions and restricts updates to the dataset-supported action set. The learned barrier is then used with a Quadratic Program (QP) formulation to synthesize real-time safe control. Across multiple case studies, V-OCBF yields substantially fewer safety violations than baseline methods while maintaining strong task performance, highlighting its scalability for offline synthesis of safety-critical controllers without online interaction or hand-engineered barriers.

Mumuksh Tayal, Manan Tayal, Ravi Prakash

Ensuring safety in robotic systems remains a fundamental challenge, especially when deploying offline policy-learning methods such as imitation learning in dynamic environments. Traditional behavior cloning (BC) often fails to generalize when deployed without fine-tuning as it does not account for disturbances in observations that arises in real-world, changing environments. To address this limitation, we propose RISE (Robust Imitation through Stochastic Encodings), a novel imitation-learning framework that explicitly addresses erroneous measurements of environment parameters into policy learning via a variational latent representation. Our framework encodes parameters such as obstacle state, orientation, and velocity into a smooth variational latent space to improve test time generalization. This enables an offline-trained policy to produce actions that are more robust to perceptual noise and environment uncertainty. We validate our approach on two robotic platforms, an autonomous ground vehicle and a Franka Emika Panda manipulator and demonstrate improved safety robustness while maintaining goal-reaching performance compared to baseline methods.