COMP3411/COMP9814 Artificial Intelligence
Assignment 2: Safe Interactive Reinforcement Learning
Term 3, 2025
Due: Friday, 14 November 2025, 5:00 PM AEST
Worth: 21 marks + 4 marks tutorial participation (25% of final grade)
1 Introduction
This assignment explores the critical challenge of safe reinforcement learning with human safety interventions. As reinforcement learning agents are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, from autonomous vehicles to medical treatment recommendation systems, ensuring their safety during learning becomes paramount [5]. Unlike traditional RL where agents learn
through trial and error (including catastrophic errors), safe RL requires agents to learn optimal behaviour whilst maintaining safety constraints at all times. You will build and evaluate a Safe
Interactive RL system where a human monitor observes an agent’s behaviour and intervenes when the agent is about to take an unsafe action. The agent must learn both to complete its
task (maximise rewards) and to predict which actions are unsafe (learn a safety shield) from sparse human intervention signals. Starting with a baseline unsafe agent and progressing to
sophisticated safety-aware systems, you will gain hands-on experience with constrained reinforcement learning, multi-class risk prediction, and the fundamental trade-offs between task
performance, safety, and intervention efficiency.
2 Background
2.1 The Safe Reinforcement Learning Problem
Reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable success in domains ranging from game playing
to robotics. However, standard RL algorithms optimise purely for task reward without explicit
safety considerations. This “reward maximisation at all costs” approach can lead to catas-
trophic failures when agents are deployed in real-world safety-critical applications. Consider an
autonomous vehicle learning to drive. A standard RL agent might learn that speeding through
intersections maximises efficiency (reaches destination faster), only discovering the danger when
a collision occurs. In safety-critical domains, such catastrophic exploration is unacceptable, we
cannot allow the agent to “learn from mistakes” when those mistakes cause serious harm.
2.2 Human-in-the-Loop Safety
One promising approach to safe RL is human-in-the-loop learning, where a human monitor
observes the agent’s behaviour and provides safety guidance [4]. In the intervention-based
paradigm, the human does not provide continuous supervision but instead intervenes only when
the agent is about to violate safety constraints. These interventions serve dual purposes: imme-
diate prevention (stop the unsafe action from occurring) and learning signal (provide training
data for the agent to learn what “unsafe” means). The key challenge is safety constraint gen-
eralisation: after observing a few human interventions at specific state-action pairs, the agent
1
COMP3411/COMP9814 Assignment 2
must learn to predict which other state-action pairs are also unsafe. This is particularly difficult due to sparse data (human interventions are hopefully infrequent), class imbalance (most
actions are safe, few are unsafe), high stakes (false negatives, missing unsafe actions, can be catastrophic), and credit assignment (human reaction delays make it unclear which past action
triggered the intervention).
2.3 Safety Shields and Constrained MDPs
A safety shield is a learned component that predicts whether a proposed action is safe before execution [1]. Formally, a shield is a function Sˆ : S×A → [0, 1] that outputs the probability that state-action pair (s, a) is unsafe. The safe RL problem can be formulated as a Constrained
Markov Decision Process (CMDP) [2]. In a standard MDP, we maximise E
[∑
t γ
tR(st, at)
]
.
In a CMDP, we maximise E
[∑
t γ
tR(st, at)
]
subject to C(st, at) ≤ δ, where C is a cost function
representing safety violations, and δ is the safety budget (ideally zero). In this assignment, you
will learn the cost function C (via the safety shield) from human interventions, rather than
specifying it manually.
3 Assignment Specification
3.1 Overview
This assignment builds a complete safe interactive reinforcement learning system through five progressive tasks. First, you will implement a grid-world environment supporting both fixed and random start position modes [Task 1]. Second, you will train a baseline Q-learning agent and
experimentally compare two step penalty configurations to understand reward shaping [Task 2]. Third, you will create a complete training dataset with all four risk classes through systematic path discovery, feature extraction, and stratified train/validation/test splitting [Task 3]. Fourth, you will train a multi-class neural network shield that predicts risk levels across
four safety categories using the dataset from [Task 3] [Task 4]. Finally, you will integrate the shield with your RL agent to achieve safe learning [Task 5]. Throughout the assignment, you will conduct hands-on experiments with critical design choices, step penalty magnitude, start
position strategy, and risk thresholds, analysing how each affects learning dynamics, task performance, and safety guarantees. These experiments will reveal important insights about the
interplay between exploration, safety, and generalisation in reinforcement learning. Section 4 provides detailed specifications for each task.
3.2 Evaluation Metrics
Your system will be evaluated using multiple metrics across three dimensions:
Safety Metrics: Total safety violations during training must be zero for a successful safe RL system. False negative rate of the shield on test interventions is the critical safety metric,
indicating how often the shield fails to detect genuinely unsafe actions. Safety violation rate
when the shield is disabled demonstrates the shield’s effectiveness by showing baseline unsafe
behaviour.
Task Performance Metrics: Average episode reward over the last 25% of training episodes
gauges overall performance. Success rate measures the percentage of episodes reaching the
goal. Average episode length indicates policy efficiency, with shorter paths being more efficient.
Training speed in episodes per second demonstrates computational efficiency.
Intervention Efficiency Metrics: Total interventions over the entire training period provides
overall intervention count. Interventions in the last 100 episodes should decrease to near zero
as the agent learns safe behaviour. Average interventions per episode tracked over time reveals
the learning trajectory of safety constraint acquisition.
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COMP3411/COMP9814 Assignment 2
These metrics will be computed at appropriate stages throughout the implementation tasks,
with detailed evaluation protocols provided in each task specification.
4 Implementation Tasks
4.1 Task 1: Safe Grid World Environment Setup
Begin by implementing the safe grid-world environment from scratch. The environment must support standard gym-like methods: reset() returns the initial state, step(action) executes an action and returns the next state, reward, and done flag, and render() visualises the current state. You must use the following exact configuration to ensure consistency across all student
submissions:
Environment Configuration:
• Grid size: 10× 10
• Start position: (0, 0) (top-left corner)
• Goal position: (9, 9) (bottom-right cor-
ner)
• Hazard cells (15 total): (0, 3), (1, 1),
(1, 7), (2, 4), (2, 8), (3, 2), (3, 6), (4, 5),
(5, 3), (5, 8), (6, 1), (6, 6), (7, 4), (8, 2),
(8, 7)
• Walls: Grid boundaries only (no internal
walls)
• Action space: UP, DOWN, LEFT,
RIGHT (4 discrete actions)
• Reward structure: +10 for reaching goal,
−0.1 per time step (step penalty), −10
for entering hazard (episode terminates
immediately)
Figure 1: Safe Grid World environment config-
uration showing the 10×10 grid with start posi-
tion (S, blue, top-left), goal position (G, green,
bottom-right), and 15 hazard cells (red) strate-
gically distributed throughout the grid. Safe
cells are shown in white.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Column Index
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Ro
w
In
de
x
S
G
Safe Grid World Environment
Start Position (0,0)
Goal Position (9,9)
Hazard Cells (n=15)
Safe Cells (n=84)
This configuration strategically distributes hazards throughout the grid to test safety shield
generalisation and safety-aware navigation. The distributed placement prevents the agent from
learning simple avoidance rules (such as “avoid certain columns”) and instead requires learning
the true underlying safety constraints whilst maintaining multiple solvable paths to the goal.
Implement collision detection for walls (agent stays in place if attempting to move out of bounds)
and hazard detection (episode terminates immediately upon entering a hazard cell). Random
Start Position (Required Feature). Your environment must support two start position
modes controlled by a boolean parameter in the environment constructor. In Fixed Start Mode
(default), every episode begins at position (0, 0), matching the standard configuration above. In
Random Start Mode, each episode begins at a randomly sampled safe position (any cell that is
not a hazard and not the goal), ensuring broader state-space exploration during training.
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COMP3411/COMP9814 Assignment 2
4.2 Task 2: Q-Learning Baseline Agent
Implement a tabular Q-learning agent as the baseline for safe RL. Q-learning is the optimal choice for this discrete 10×10 grid (100 states, 4 actions) because the state space is small enough to
store exact Q-values for every state-action pair in a table. This baseline demonstrates why safety
mechanisms are essential, the agent will frequently violate safety constraints during exploration
as it learns the optimal policy.
Q-Learning Algorithm. Maintain a Q-table Q : S × A → R that stores the expected return
for each state-action pair. The standard Q-learning update rule is:
Q(s, a)← Q(s, a) + α
[
r + γmax
a′
Q(s′, a′)−Q(s, a)
]
where α is the learning rate, r is the immediate reward, γ is the discount factor, and maxa′ Q(s
′, a′)
is the maximum Q-value for the next state (representing the best future return).
Hyperparameter Configuration. Select values from the following ranges (see Table 1):
Parameter Range Baseline
Learning rate (α) [0.05, 0.2] 0.1
Discount factor (γ) [0.95, 0.999] 0.99
Epsilon start (ϵstart) Fixed 1.0
Epsilon min (ϵmin) [0.01, 0.05] 0.01
Epsilon decay [0.99, 0.997] 0.995
Training episodes (N) [1,500, 3,000] 2,000
Max steps per episode Fixed 200
Table 1: Hyperparameters for [Task 2] Q-learning baseline agent
Evaluation Metrics. Compute and report the following metrics (Table 2), whereM = ⌊0.25×
N⌋ denotes the last 25% of episodes.
Metric Formula Description
Performance Metrics (computed over last M episodes)
Success Rate
1
M
N∑
i=N−M+1
⊮[rewardi > 0]
× 100%
Percentage reaching goal
Average Reward R¯ = 1M
∑N
i=N−M+1Ri Mean cumulative reward
Episode Length L¯ = 1M
∑N
i=N−M+1 Li Mean steps
Training Metrics (computed over all N episodes)
Safety Violations Vtotal =
∑N
i=1 Vi Total hazard entries
Training Speed NTtotal (eps/sec)
Table 2: Evaluation metrics for [Task 2] Q-learning baseline agent
where ⊮[·] is the indicator function (1 if condition true, 0 otherwise), Ri is cumulative reward
for episode i, Li is steps in episode i, Vi is hazard entries in episode i, and Ttotal is total training
time in seconds.
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COMP3411/COMP9814 Assignment 2
Required Visualisations. Generate the following plots using 100-episode sliding window
smoothing where appropriate: Training Reward Curve – episode number vs smoothed episode
reward; Episode Length Over Time – episode number vs smoothed episode length (steps); Cu-
mulative Safety Violations – episode number vs cumulative sum of hazard entries; Success Rate
Over Time – episode number vs success rate (%) with 100-episode rolling window.
Step Penalty Experimentation (Required). Train the Q-learning agent with two different
step penalty values using fixed start mode (random start=False). This experiment explores
reward shaping in safety-critical reinforcement learning [3]:
1. Configuration 1: step penalty=-1.0
2. Configuration 2: step penalty=-0.1
Deliverables: For each configuration:
• Compute and report all 5 metrics (success rate, average reward, episode length, total
violations, training speed)
• Generate all 4 plots (reward curve, episode length, cumulative violations, success rate).
Figure 2 shows sample plots for reference.
• Create a comparison table showing side-by-side metric differences
0 250 500 750 1000 1250 1500 1750
Episode
40
30
20
10
0
Re
wa
rd
(s
m
oo
th
ed
)
SAM
PLE
Training Reward Comparison
Penalty = -1.0 (harsh)
Penalty = -0.1 (gentle)
0 250 500 750 1000 1250 1500 1750
Episode
12.5
15.0
17.5
20.0
22.5
25.0
27.5
30.0
St
ep
s (
sm
oo
th
ed
)
SAM
PLE
Episode Length Comparison
Penalty = -1.0 (harsh)
Penalty = -0.1 (gentle)
0 250 500 750 1000 1250 1500 1750 2000
Episode
0
200
400
600
800
1000
Cu
m
ul
at
iv
e
Vi
ol
at
io
ns
SAM
PLE
Safety Violations Comparison (No Shield Yet)
Penalty = -1.0 (harsh)
Penalty = -0.1 (gentle)
0 250 500 750 1000 1250 1500 1750
Episode
0
20
40
60
80
100
Su
cc
es
s R
at
e
(%
)
SAM
PLE
Success Rate Comparison (100-episode rolling window)
Penalty = -1.0 (harsh, 0%)
Penalty = -0.1 (gentle, ~97%)
Target: 100%
Figure 2: Sample training plots comparing penalty=-1.0 (red) vs penalty=-0.1 (blue) over 2000 episodes.
Shows the four required plots: training reward curve, episode length, cumulative safety violations, and
success rate.
Save the Q-table and metrics from the better-performing configuration to disk using pickle for
later use in safety shield integration [Task 5]. The baseline agent will violate safety constraints
frequently, this is expected and demonstrates why safety mechanisms are necessary. You will
create a comprehensive safety dataset [Task 3], train a neural network safety shield [Task 4], and
integrate the shield with your RL agent [Task 5] to prevent these violations while maintaining
task performance.
5
COMP3411/COMP9814 Assignment 2
4.3 Task 3: Complete Dataset Creation
In this task, you will create a complete training dataset for the safety shield classifier by system-
atically labelling all possible state-action pairs in the environment. Unlike reactive approaches
that learn from observed safety violations, you will proactively construct a comprehensive safety
dataset by computing the danger profile of every state in the grid. This exhaustive approach
ensures the safety shield has complete knowledge of all possible situations it may encounter
during deployment.
The dataset creation pipeline consists of three algorithmic steps: (1) computing a global “danger
map” that records the minimum steps to hazard for every state using multi-source BFS, (2)
generating labelled samples by iterating through all state-action pairs and classifying them based
on the danger map, and (3) feature extraction and train/validation/test splitting. The final
deliverable is complete dataset.pkl, a ready-to-use dataset containing 336 labelled samples
with 10-dimensional feature vectors.
Key Concept Definitions. To understand the dataset creation process, we first establish the
following formal definitions:
• Hazard Set: Let H ⊂ S be the set of 15 designated hazard states in the grid world.
These are fixed grid positions that represent unsafe states where the agent must not enter.
• Distance to Nearest Hazard: For any state s ∈ S, let d(s) denote the minimum number
of actions required to reach the nearest hazard from s. For hazard states, d(h) = 0 for all
h ∈ H.
• Danger Map: A complete mapping D : S → N where D(s) = min{d(s, h) | h ∈ H} gives
the minimum steps from state s to the nearest hazard. This is computed efficiently using
multi-source BFS starting from all hazards simultaneously.
• Risk Class: The safety classification of a state-action pair (s, a) based on the next state
s′ = δ(s, a): Class 0 if D(s′) = 0 (immediate hazard), Class 1 if D(s′) = 1 (1-step danger),
Class 2 if D(s′) = 2 (2-step danger), or Class 3 if D(s′) ≥ 3 (safe).
Algorithmic Insight – Multi-Source BFS: Rather than performing hundreds of separate
BFS searches from individual states (naive approach with O(n2 · |V | · |E|) complexity), you will
compute the minimum steps to hazard for all states in a single, efficient graph traversal with
O(|V | + |E|) complexity. Initialise a BFS queue with all 15 hazard positions simultaneously
(multi-source BFS). As the search expands outward from these hazards, each state is labelled
with its distance to the nearest hazard. This creates a complete “danger map” of the environment
in one pass, which is then used to label all state-action pairs.
Step 1: Compute Global Danger Map. Your first step is to compute the minimum number
of steps from every state in the grid to the nearest hazard using a single multi-source Breadth-
First Search. This creates a “danger map” that will be the foundation for labelling all state-
action pairs.
Multi-Source BFS Algorithm:
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COMP3411/COMP9814 Assignment 2
Algorithm 1 ComputeDangerMap – Multi-source BFS to compute minimum steps to hazard
for all states
Require: Environment env with hazard set H
Ensure: Danger map D : S → N where D(s) = minimum steps from state s to nearest hazard
1: Initialise empty map D ← ∅
2: Initialise empty queue Q← ∅
3:
4: ▷ Initialise: All hazards have distance 0
5: for each h ∈ H do
6: D[h]← 0
7: Enqueue (h, 0) into Q
8: end for
9:
10: ▷ Multi-source BFS: Expand outward from all hazards simultaneously
11: while Q ̸= ∅ do
12: (scurrent, d)← Dequeue from Q
13: for each action a ∈ {UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT} do
14: snext ← ComputeNextPosition(scurrent, a)
15: if snext /∈ D then
16: D[snext]← d+ 1 ▷ Label with distance
17: Enqueue (snext, d+ 1) into Q
18: end if
19: end for
20: end while
21: return D
This algorithm performs a single BFS traversal that computes the minimum steps to hazard for
all 100 states in the grid. States closer to hazards are discovered first, ensuring each state is
labelled with the shortest distance. The result is a complete map of the environment’s danger
profile.
Example: Consider state (5, 5) and assume the nearest hazard is at (5, 8). After running
the multi-source BFS, danger map[(5, 5)] would store the value 3 (three steps to the nearest
hazard). If you take action RIGHT from (5, 5), you move to (5, 6), and danger map[(5, 6)]
would be 2. This means the state-action pair ((5, 5),RIGHT) leads to a next state that is 2
steps from a hazard, making it a Class 2 (2-Step Danger) sample.
Step 2: Generate and Label Complete Dataset. With the danger map from Step 1, you
can now generate all samples in a single pass by iterating through every possible state-action
pair in the environment. For each pair, look up the pre-computed danger value and assign the
appropriate class label.
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COMP3411/COMP9814 Assignment 2
Algorithm 2 GenerateLabelledDataset – Generate complete dataset using pre-computed dan-
ger map
Require: Environment env with grid size n, hazard set H, goal state sg
Require: Danger map D from Algorithm 1
Ensure: Complete dataset X = {(s, a, c)} where c ∈ {0, 1, 2, 3} is the risk class
1: Initialise empty dataset X ← ∅
2:
3: ▷ Iterate through all state-action pairs
4: for row ← 0 to n− 1 do
5: for col← 0 to n− 1 do
6: s← (row, col)
7: if s ∈ H or s = sg then
8: continue ▷ Skip hazards and goal
9: end if
10:
11: for each action a ∈ {UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT} do
12: s′ ← ComputeNextPosition(s, a)
13: d← D[s′] ▷ Look up pre-computed distance
14:
15: ▷ Assign class label based on minimum steps to hazard
16: if d = 0 then
17: c← 0 ▷ Immediate hazard
18: else if d = 1 then
19: c← 1 ▷ 1-step danger
20: else if d = 2 then
21: c← 2 ▷ 2-step danger
22: else
23: c← 3 ▷ Safe (d ≥ 3)
24: end if
25:
26: Add (s, a, c) to X
27: end for
28: end for
29: end for
30: return X
This approach is simple, efficient, and complete. You iterate through all ∼84 non-hazard states
× 4 actions =∼336 state-action pairs, performing only a dictionary lookup for each (no BFS
needed). The result is a complete dataset covering all possible state-action pairs in the environ-
ment, automatically labelled by risk class.
Step 3: Feature Extraction and Final Assembly. Now that you have all labelled samples
from Step 2, you must extract feature vectors for each sample and prepare the final dataset with
train/validation/test splits.
Feature Vector Construction. For each state-action pair (s, a), construct a 10-dimensional
feature vector (Table 3). Let s = (x, y) be the current state and s′ = (x′, y′) be the next state
after taking action a:
8
COMP3411/COMP9814 Assignment 2
Feature Description Dims
1–2 Current position (x, y) normalised to [0, 1] (divide by grid size) 2
3–6 One-hot encoded action [UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT] 4
7–8 Next position (x′, y′) normalised to [0, 1] (divide by grid size) 2
9 Min steps to hazard from current state, D(s), normalised by 10 1
10 Min steps to hazard from next state, D(s′), normalised by 10 1
Total 10
Table 3: Feature vector construction for [Task 3] dataset creation
Features 9 and 10 are the critical safety features, they encode the safety trajectory by providing
both the current risk level D(s) and the next risk level D(s′). Together, these features allow the
classifier to understand whether an action moves the agent closer to or further from hazards.
Both features require only simple lookups from the pre-computed danger map.
Class Distribution. After generating the complete dataset in Step 2 (all 336 state-action
pairs from 84 valid states × 4 actions), you will observe a significant class imbalance. Due to
the strategic placement of 15 hazards throughout the 10×10 grid, the environment is highly
constrained, most states are within 2 steps of a hazard. Classes 0–2 (unsafe actions) will signif-
icantly outnumber Class 3 (safe actions), with Class 1 being the most common. This imbalance
reflects the genuine difficulty of the environment: very few actions are truly “safe” (far from all
hazards). You will use ALL 336 samples from all four classes in the final dataset.
Train/Validation/Test Splits. Split the complete dataset into train (70%), validation (15%),
and test (15%) sets using stratified sampling (stratify=y) to ensure balanced class distribution
across all splits.
Output. Your dataset must contain train, validation, and test splits with 10-dimensional feature
vectors and corresponding class labels (0–3), in a format suitable for loading into [Task 4].
4.4 Task 4: Safety Shield Training
In this task, you will train a multi-class neural network classifier to predict risk levels for state action pairs. The dataset created in [Task 3] contains all necessary features and labels in a ready-to-use format. Your focus here is purely on model training and evaluation.
Dataset Loading. Load the complete dataset you created in [Task 3]. The dataset contains
train, validation, and test splits with 10-dimensional feature vectors and class labels (0–3).
Network Architecture. Implement a multi-class neural network safety shield classifier with
the following architecture (Table 4):
Layer Neurons Activation
Input Layer 10 –
Hidden Layer 1 Tunable* ReLU
Hidden Layer 2 Tunable* ReLU
Output Layer 4 Softmax
Table 4: Neural network architecture for [Task 4] safety shield classifier
9
COMP3411/COMP9814 Assignment 2
* See hyperparameter table for hidden layer size range and suggested value.
The input layer accepts 10-dimensional feature vectors from [Task 3]. The output layer produces
P (class | s, a) for classes 0–3 using softmax activation.
Risk Classes. The network predicts 4 risk classes (0–3) as defined in [Task 3]: Class 0 (imme-
diate hazard), Class 1 (1-step danger), Class 2 (2-step danger), and Class 3 (safe states).
Hyperparameters. Train your neural network using the following hyperparameters (Table 5).
You may experiment within the specified ranges to optimise performance, but you must report
the final values used.
Hyperparameter Range Baseline
Hidden layer size [32, 128] 64
Learning rate (α) [0.0001, 0.01] 0.001
Batch size [16, 64] 32
Epochs [50, 200] 100
Loss function Fixed Cross-entropy
Optimiser Fixed Adam
Random seed Fixed 42
Table 5: Hyperparameters for [Task 4] safety shield training
where cross-entropy loss is defined as Loss = −∑3c=0 yc · log(yˆc) with yc being 1 if the true class
is c (one-hot encoded) and 0 otherwise, and yˆc is the predicted probability for class c.
Evaluation Metrics. Evaluate your trained model on both validation and test sets and report
overall accuracy as the fraction of correctly classified samples (target: > 90%), per-class accuracy
showing classification accuracy for each of the 4 risk classes separately (critical for safety: Class
0 accuracy > 95% to correctly identify immediate hazards), confusion matrix as a 4 × 4 table
showing true labels vs predicted labels, and training curves plotting training and validation loss
vs epoch number showing smooth convergence.
Required Deliverables. Report the following results for both validation and test sets (Ta-
ble 6):
Deliverable Description
Overall Accuracy Report as percentage (e.g., 95.2%)
Per-Class Accuracy Accuracy for each of the 4 risk classes: Class 0, Class
1, Class 2, Class 3
Confusion Matrix 4 × 4 table showing true vs predicted labels (see Fig-
ure 3 for sample format)
Loss Curves Single plot showing both training and validation loss
vs epoch (see Figure 3 for sample format)
Table 6: Required deliverables for [Task 4] safety shield training
Figure 3 shows sample confusion matrix and loss curves for reference.
Output. Save your trained model weights for use in [Task 5] along with training metrics and
visualisations.
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COMP3411/COMP9814 Assignment 2
Class 0 Class 1 Class 2 Class 3
Predicted Label
Class 0
Class 1
Class 2
Class 3
Tr
ue
L
ab
el
9 0 0 0
0 23 1 0
1 1 12 0
0 0 1 3
SAM
PLE
Sample Confusion Matrix (Test Set)
0 20 40 60 80 100
Epoch
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1.0
1.2
1.4
1.6
Cr
os
s-
En
tr
op
y
Lo
ss
SAM
PLE
Sample Training and Validation Loss Curves
Training Loss
Validation Loss
0
5
10
15
20
Num
ber of Sam
ples
Figure 3: Sample results for [Task 4] showing (left) confusion matrix on test set with strong diagonal
indicating correct classifications, and (right) training and validation loss curves showing smooth conver-
gence. These are sample results for illustration purposes only; your actual results may differ based on
implementation and hyperparameter choices.
Pedagogical Note: Oracle to Approximator. This task demonstrates a fundamental ML
pattern for safety-critical systems. [Task 3] used exhaustive BFS (the expensive oracle), com-
putationally expensive with full graph search but deterministic and complete. [Task 4] trains
a neural network to approximate the oracle’s behaviour, inference is fast (single forward pass
vs full BFS) and generalises to unseen states. This mirrors real-world ML deployment: use an
expensive oracle to generate high-quality training data, then train a fast model to approximate
the oracle’s behaviour for real-time use.
4.5 Task 5: Integration – Safe RL with Multi-Class Shield
Integrate your trained 4-class safety shield with the Q-learning agent to enable risk-aware action
selection during training. The shield predicts a risk class in {0, 1, 2, 3} for each state-action pair,
where Class 0 indicates immediate hazard, Class 1 indicates 1-step danger, Class 2 indicates
2-step danger, and Class 3 indicates safe states (as defined in [Task 3]).
Risk Threshold Parameter. Define a threshold parameter θ ∈ {0, 1, 2, 3} as the intervention
threshold. An action a in state s is acceptable if and only if its predicted class c(s, a) > θ.
Actions with class ≤ θ trigger intervention. Set θ = 2 as the default value. For example, with
θ = 2, only actions predicted as Class 3 are acceptable (class > 2); actions predicted as Class 0,
1, or 2 trigger intervention. With θ = 0, only Class 0 triggers intervention; Classes 1, 2, and 3
are acceptable.
Intervention Policy. At each time step t, the agent must follow this intervention policy:
(1) the agent proposes an action aprop using ϵ-greedy selection from its Q-table, (2) the shield
predicts the risk class c(st, a) for all four actions a ∈ {UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT} in the cur-
rent state st, (3) if c(st, aprop) > θ, execute aprop directly (no intervention needed), (4) otherwise,
build the candidate set C = {a : c(st, a) > θ} of acceptable actions, (5) if C ̸= ∅, execute at =
argmaxa∈C Q(st, a) (choose acceptable action with highest Q-value), (6) if C = ∅ (no accept-
able actions exist), compute cmax = maxa c(st, a) and execute at = argmaxa:c(st,a)=cmax Q(st, a)
(choose least risky action with highest Q-value). If multiple actions tie on Q-value, use deter-
ministic tie-breaking (e.g., select first in fixed order UP, RIGHT, DOWN, LEFT).
Training Loop. Train your safe RL system for 1,000 episodes. For each episode, reset the
environment to a random safe starting position and run for a maximum of 200 steps or until
reaching a terminal state (goal or hazard). At each time step: (1) apply the intervention policy
above to select action at, (2) execute at in the environment to observe reward rt+1 and next
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COMP3411/COMP9814 Assignment 2
state st+1, (3) update the Q-table using the executed action at (not the proposed action):
Q(st, at)← Q(st, at) + α
[
rt+1 + γmax
a′
Q(st+1, a
′)−Q(st, at)
]
Log metrics per episode: number of interventions (count of steps where at ̸= aprop), safety
violations (count of transitions that enter a hazard cell according to ground-truth environment
state), and episode return (sum of rewards).
Hyperparameters. Use the hyperparameters specified in Table 7.
Hyperparameter Value/Range Notes
Learning rate (α) 0.1 Fixed
Discount factor (γ) 0.99 Fixed
Risk threshold (θ) Test ≥ 2 values e.g., θ = 0 and θ = 2
Episodes 1,000 Fixed
Max steps per episode 200 Fixed
Epsilon start (ϵstart) 1.0 Fixed
Epsilon min (ϵmin) 0.01 Fixed
Epsilon decay 0.995 Exponential decay per episode
Random start position Enabled Use random safe starting positions
Random seed 123 Suggested for reproducibility
Table 7: Hyperparameters for [Task 5] safe RL training
Required Deliverables. Generate comparison plots (with smoothing) showing: (1) episode
rewards over training for baseline Q-learning (no shield) and safe RL with at least two different
risk threshold values, (2) safety violations per episode for all approaches (target: zero or near-zero
for safe RL), (3) shield interventions per episode for each threshold value tested, and (4) summary
statistics comparing final performance metrics (success rate, violations, interventions, average
reward). Report final metrics averaged over the last 100 episodes for each configuration tested.
Figure 4 shows sample plots for reference.
Risk Threshold Experimentation (Required): In your report, you must compare the
results of using at least two different risk threshold values (e.g., θ = 0 and θ = 2, or θ = 1 and
θ = 2). Analyse the impact of this parameter on the trade-off between safety (violation rate),
task performance (success rate, average reward), and intervention efficiency (total interventions,
interventions per episode). Discuss which threshold value provides the best balance for this
environment and explain your reasoning. Figure 4 demonstrates this threshold comparison
showing baseline performance alongside two different threshold configurations.
4.6 Model Evaluation
Evaluate your final safe RL system across multiple dimensions using clearly defined metrics.
Safety Metrics. Measure (1) total safety violations over all 1,000 training episodes, where a
violation is defined as any transition that results in the agent entering a hazard cell according
to ground-truth environment state (target: 0 violations), (2) false negative rate of the shield on
test data, computed as the fraction of Class 0 or Class 1 actions incorrectly predicted as Class
12
COMP3411/COMP9814 Assignment 2
0 250 500 750 1000 1250 1500 1750 2000
Episode
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Episode Rewards Comparison
Baseline (no shield)
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=2
0 250 500 750 1000 1250 1500 1750 2000
Episode
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Safety Violations Comparison
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Shield Interventions Comparison
=0
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THRESHOLD COMPARISON SUMMARY
==================================================
Episodes: 2000
SAFETY VIOLATIONS:
Baseline: 423
=0: 0 (100.0% reduction)
=2: 0 (100.0% reduction)
SUCCESS RATE:
Baseline: 68.5%
=0: 98.2%
=2: 3.5%
INTERVENTIONS (total):
=0: 18 (avg: 0.0/ep)
=2: 185340 (avg: 185.7/ep)
FINAL REWARD (last 100 episodes):
Baseline: 6.8
=0: 8.7
=2: -17.9
KEY INSIGHT:
=0: Fewer interventions, faster learning
=2: More interventions, maximum safety
Figure 4: Sample results for [Task 5] comparing baseline Q-learning (no shield) with safe RL using
different risk thresholds (θ = 0 and θ = 2). Top row: Episode rewards (left) and safety violations (right)
across all three approaches. Bottom row: Shield interventions for θ = 0 and θ = 2 (left), and summary
statistics (right) showing key metrics including success rate, violations, and intervention frequency. These
are sample results for illustration purposes; your actual results may differ based on implementation and
hyperparameter choices.
2 or Class 3 (indicates shield failures that could allow unsafe actions), and (3) violation rate
without shield by running the final Q-table for 100 episodes with the shield disabled to measure
baseline safety.
Task Performance. Measure (1) average episode return computed as mean total reward per
episode over the last 100 episodes (compare to unsafe baseline from [Task 2]), (2) success rate
as the percentage of episodes in the last 100 that reach the goal state without entering a hazard,
and (3) average episode length as mean number of steps per episode in the last 100 episodes.
Intervention Efficiency. Measure (1) total interventions over all 1,000 training episodes,
where an intervention is defined as any step where the executed action at differs from the
proposed action aprop due to shield intervention, (2) interventions in last 100 episodes to assess
whether the agent has learned a safe policy (target: near zero), and (3) average interventions
per episode tracked over training to visualise the learning trajectory.
Visualisations. Create a comparison summary displaying key metrics for both the unsafe
baseline [Task 2] and the safe RL system [Task 5] with different threshold values, including
average reward, success rate, safety violations, and total interventions. See Figure 4 (bottom
right panel) for reference format showing how to present these comparative statistics alongside
your training curves.
13
COMP3411/COMP9814 Assignment 2
5 Assessment Breakdown
The assignment is marked out of 25, with marks distributed across implementation, understand-
ing, experimental analysis, and tutorial participation components as shown in Table 8.
Table 8: Assessment breakdown showing mark distribution across components
Category Component Marks
Implementation (36%)
Environment implementation with configurable step penalties 1
Q-learning baseline with two-penalty comparison 1
Systematic intervention generation 1
Safety shield learning and evaluation 3
Safe RL integration with shield 2
Code clarity and style 1
Subtotal 9
Understanding &
Discussion (48%)
Safe RL Concepts:
Constrained MDPs and safety formulation 1
Shield design and safety constraint learning 1
Multi-class risk stratification and advantages 1
False positive vs. false negative trade-offs 1
Implementation Understanding:
Feature engineering for safety prediction 1
Shield training and class imbalance handling 1
RL-shield integration strategy 1
Reward shaping analysis 1
Experimental Analysis:
Baseline vs. safe system comparison 1
Step penalty comparison and reward shaping 1
Multi-class safety shield performance analysis 1
Risk-aware intervention strategy evaluation 1
Subtotal 12
Tutorial Participation (16%) Practical work and engagement in tutorials 4
TOTAL 25
6 Discussion Session
All students must attend a mandatory 15–20 minute discussion with a tutor (face-to-face or
online) to demonstrate understanding of their implementation and the underlying concepts.
You will be asked to explain your implementation choices, demonstrate your working system,
discuss results and trade-offs, and answer conceptual questions about safe RL and constrained
MDPs. The discussion is worth 12 marks (48% of the total assignment grade) and assesses
your genuine understanding of the work submitted. Schedule your discussion session through
the online booking system (link will be provided on Moodle). Failure to attend your scheduled
discussion session without valid reason will result in zero marks for the discussion component.
14
COMP3411/COMP9814 Assignment 2
7 Submission
7.1 Deadline and Late Penalties
Due Date: Friday, 14 November 2025, 5:00 PM AEST (Week 9)
Late Penalty: UNSW has a standard late submission penalty of 5% per day from your mark,
capped at five days from the assessment deadline. After five days, students cannot submit the
assignment.
7.2 Required Components
Your submission must include the following components:
1. Jupyter Notebook. Submit a single Jupyter notebook containing all implementation code
for Tasks 1–5. The notebook must be well-organised with clear markdown cells explaining your
implementation decisions, design choices, and key observations. Your code cells should include
appropriate comments for complex logic, but avoid over-commenting obvious operations. Use
meaningful variable names and maintain consistent code structure throughout.
2. Generated Dataset. Submit the complete intervention dataset generated in [Task 3], saved
in a format that can be easily loaded (e.g., pickle file, CSV, or NumPy array). This dataset
should contain all state-action-risk class tuples collected through systematic BFS exploration,
properly labelled with risk classes 0, 1, 2, and 3. Include the total number of samples and class
distribution in your notebook documentation.
7.3 How to Submit
Submit your assignment electronically via Moodle. Your submission must be a single zip file
named zID assignment2.zip (replace zID with your student ID) containing your Jupyter note-
book (.ipynb file) and the generated intervention dataset (e.g., complete dataset.pkl).
Important: Test thoroughly before submission. If your models fail to load or run during
evaluation, you may lose up to 50% of the marks for that component. You can submit as many
times as you like before the deadline; later submissions overwrite earlier ones. After submitting,
take a screenshot for your records.
7.4 Getting Help
Use the Moodle forum for assignment-related questions. We prioritise forum questions, but
avoid sharing code publicly to prevent plagiarism issues. For code-specific questions, email
[email protected]. We aim to respond quickly, but may take up to 1–2 business days,
so avoid last-minute questions that might not receive timely responses. For questions about
discussion sessions, contact your tutor directly (see Section 8 for tutor information).
8 Tutor Information
Table 9 lists the tutors for this course along with their assigned class IDs and contact email
addresses. Please contact your tutor directly for questions about discussion sessions or class-
specific matters.
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COMP3411/COMP9814 Assignment 2
No. Class ID(s) Tutor Email
1 13192, 13193, 13198, 13199 Adam Stucci [email protected]
2 4198, 4202, 4204, 6344, 6348, 6350 Hadha Afrisal [email protected]
3 4212, 4215, 6358, 6361 Haitao Gao [email protected]
4 4205, 4214, 6351, 6360 Ishan Dubey [email protected]
5 4197, 4213, 6343, 6359 Joffrey Ji [email protected]
6 4199, 4209, 6345, 6355 John Chen [email protected]
7 4219, 6365, 13076, 13077, 13078, 13079 Jonas Macken [email protected]
8 4206, 4216, 6352, 6362 Leman Kirme [email protected]
9 4201, 4211, 6347, 6357 Maher Mesto [email protected]
10 4223, 4224, 6369, 6370 Marium Malik [email protected]
11 4203, 4208, 6349, 6354 Peter Ho [email protected]
12 4210, 4220, 6356, 6366 Trishika Abrol [email protected]
13 4200, 4207, 6346, 6353 Xiongyu Xie [email protected]
14 4217, 4218, 6363, 6364 Yixin Kang [email protected]
15 4221, 4222, 6367, 6368 Zahra Donyavi [email protected]
Table 9: Course tutors and their assigned classes.
9 Academic Integrity
This assignment is individual work. You may discuss high-level concepts with classmates, but all
code and written work must be your own. Do not share code with other students. Large language
models and AI assistants (such as ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot) may be used for learning concepts,
understanding syntax, debugging assistance, and clarifying documentation. However, you must
NOT use AI tools to generate complete solutions for entire tasks or to write substantial portions
of your implementation, which might lead to poor understanding of the code. The submitted
code must be your own work that you have written and fully understand.
10 References
References
[1] Mohammed Alshiekh, Roderick Bloem, Ru¨diger Ehlers, Bettina Ko¨nighofer, Scott Niekum,
and Ufuk Topcu. Safe reinforcement learning via shielding. In Proceedings of the AAAI
Conference on Artificial Intelligence, volume 32, 2018.
[2] Eitan Altman. Constrained Markov Decision Processes. Chapman & Hall/CRC, 1999.
[3] Fatemeh Yousefinejad Ravari and Saeed Jalili. Reward shaping in reinforcement learning
of multi-objective safety critical systems. In 2024 20th CSI International Symposium on
Artificial Intelligence and Signal Processing (AISP), pages 1–6. IEEE, 2024.
[4] William Saunders, Girish Sastry, Andreas Stuhlmu¨ller, and Owain Evans. Trial without
error: Towards safe reinforcement learning via human intervention. In Proceedings of the
17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS),
pages 2067–2069, 2018.
[5] Brijen Thananjeyan, Ashwin Balakrishna, Suraj Nair, Michael Luo, Krishnan Srinivasan,
Minho Hwang, Joseph E Gonzalez, Julian Ibarz, Chelsea Finn, and Ken Goldberg. Recovery
rl: Safe reinforcement learning with learned recovery zones. IEEE Robotics and Automation
Letters, 6(3):4915–4922, 2021.
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