SafeExplorer: An Unbiased Mixed-Policy Gradient for Reinforcement Learning with Recovery Interventions

Training agents directly on the task they will be deployed on often leads to the best policy performance, but training on physical robots can cause damage through falls, so minimizing training falls is critical. A standard mitigation hands control to a separate recovery policy whenever the agent leaves a designer-specified safe region. The resulting mixed-policy rollouts bias the on-policy update, and importance sampling cannot remove this bias when the recovery policy is deterministic. We propose SafeExplorer, a drop-in modification of proximal policy optimization (PPO) built on an unbiased policy-gradient estimator of the mixed-policy return. The estimator uses the score function only inside the safe region and never evaluates the recovery policy's density, so deterministic recovery policies pose no problem. On final reward, the estimator matches or outperforms truncated importance sampling, which is itself biased for that same gradient. SafeExplorer also speeds up learning near the safe-region boundary with a closed-form critic target at recovery-triggering states when dynamics and recovery are deterministic, and an imitation loss that copies recovery actions only from successful recoveries. On three simulated locomotion environments with ten seeds each, and given an already available recovery controller, SafeExplorer incurs 255 times, 43 times, and 21 times fewer training falls than standard PPO on HalfCheetah, Ant, and Unitree Go1. SafeExplorer also matches or exceeds the final reward of PPO. On Ant, where 8.7% of recovery interventions end in a fall, over 40 times the HalfCheetah rate, SafeExplorer reaches the success threshold on every seed and none of the five baselines reaches the threshold on any seed.