arXiv:2605.25267v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safe in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) adapts online from interaction history without test-time parameter updates while controlling episode cost under a safety budget. Under out-of-distribution (OOD) deployment shifts, pretraining-only safe ICRL can give poor reward-safety tradeoffs because the remaining budget affects behavior only through frozen policy conditioning, not an explicit action-level check against predicted future cost. We propose a latent Q-Barrier shield that learns a context representation, latent dynamics, and an ensemble cost critic before deployment. Without parameter updates, the shield infers context from history and filters or softly reweights candidate actions using the remaining budget and predicted future cost. We prove a conditional, error-decomposed barrier-margin result: a Q-Barrier-satisfying action leaves the next latent-budget state with an approximately budget-safe continuation under the learned critic, up to Bellman and latent-prediction errors. Across five safe ICRL benchmarks, the shield improves deployment-time reward-safety tradeoffs over a strong safe-ICRL baseline: after a short context window, it achieves higher return in four of five benchmarks while matching or lowering average episode cost in all five.

arXiv:2409.12135v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation (linear TD) is a classic and powerful prediction algorithm in reinforcement learning. While it is well-understood that linear TD converges almost surely to a unique point, this convergence traditionally requires the assumption that the features used by the approximator are linearly independent. However, this linear independence assumption does not hold in many practical scenarios. This work is the first to establish the almost sure convergence of linear TD without requiring linearly independent features. We prove that the weight iterates of linear TD converge to a bounded set, and that the value estimates derived from the weights in that set are the same almost everywhere. We also establish a notion of local stability of the weight iterates. Importantly, we do not impose assumptions tailored to feature dependence and do not modify the linear TD algorithm. Key to our analysis is a novel characterization of bounded invariant sets of the mean ODE of linear TD.