EpiFlow: Bridging Safety and Performance in Offline Reinforcement Learning via Epigraph-Guided Flow Matching

Abstract

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising framework for deploying autonomous systems in safety-critical settings without the risks of online exploration. However, learning policies that simultaneously achieve high performance and strong safety guarantees from fixed datasets remains a fundamental challenge. Many existing safe offline RL approaches typically rely on soft constraint formulations, which may permit safety violations and are sensitive to distributional shift. In contrast, formal methods such as Hamilton--Jacobi (HJ) reachability and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide rigorous safety guarantees, but often yield overly conservative solutions, often neglecting performance. In this work, we bridge this gap by formulating safe offline RL as a state-constrained optimal control problem, where safety is enforced through hard state constraints and performance is captured via a reward function. The resulting value function satisfies a Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman (HJB) equation, which we approximate using offline RL on fixed datasets by learning an epigraph feasibility value function and extracting policies via flow matching. This formulation enables principled integration of safety guarantees with data-driven policy optimization. Empirically, across safety-critical benchmarks including boat navigation, Safety-Gymnasium, and Bullet-Safety-Gym tasks, our approach achieves competitive returns while exhibiting near-zero constraint violations, demonstrating a favorable balance between safety and performance in the offline setting.

arXiv comment27 pages, 10 figures, first two authors have contributed equally. Paper accepted at NeurIPS 2026