Title: Safe In-Context Reinforcement Learning
Primary area: reinforcement learning
Keywords: reinforcement learning, in-context learning, safe reinforcement learning

Abstract: In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) is an emerging RL paradigm where the agent, after some pretraining procedure, is able to adapt to out-of-distribution test tasks without any parameter updates.
The agent achieves this by continually expanding the input (i.e., the context) to its policy neural networks.
For example,
the input could be all the history experience that the agent has access to until the current time step. 
The agent's performance improves as the input grows, without any parameter updates.
In this work,
we propose the first method that promotes the safety of ICRL's adaptation process in the framework of constrained Markov Decision Processes.
In other words,
during the parameter-update-free adaptation process,
the agent not only maximizes the reward but also minimizes an additional cost function.
We also demonstrate\footnote{All the implementations will be made publicly available and are now located in the supplementary materials.} that our agent actively reacts to the threshold (i.e., budget) of the cost tolerance.
With a higher cost buget, the agent behaves more aggressively, and with a lower cost budget, the agent behaves more conservatively.