Shielding Atari Games with Bounded Prescience
  Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is applied in safety-critical domains such
as robotics and autonomous driving. It achieves superhuman abilities in many
tasks, however whether DRL agents can be shown to act safely is an open
problem. Atari games are a simple yet challenging exemplar for evaluating the
safety of DRL agents and feature a diverse portfolio of game mechanics. The
safety of neural agents has been studied before using methods that either
require a model of the system dynamics or an abstraction; unfortunately, these
are unsuitable to Atari games because their low-level dynamics are complex and
hidden inside their emulator. We present the first exact method for analysing
and ensuring the safety of DRL agents for Atari games. Our method only requires
access to the emulator. First, we give a set of 43 properties that characterise
"safe behaviour" for 30 games. Second, we develop a method for exploring all
traces induced by an agent and a game and consider a variety of sources of game
non-determinism. We observe that the best available DRL agents reliably satisfy
only very few properties; several critical properties are violated by all
agents. Finally, we propose a countermeasure that combines a bounded
explicit-state exploration with shielding. We demonstrate that our method
improves the safety of all agents over multiple properties.
