Accelerating Safe Reinforcement Learning with Massive Parallelism

Joonyoung Lim, Younghwan Yoo

We investigate the problem of scaling safe reinforcement learning (safe RL) to massively parallel training regimes, where a large number of environments are exe- cuted with short rollout horizons. Although this setting improves data throughput and wall-clock efficiency, it creates a mismatch with constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), whose safety constraints are defined over full-episode cost returns. We address this mismatch by analyzing staggered environment resets as a phase-mixture distribution over short trajectory segments. This analysis charac- terizes the bias induced by phase coverage and motivates a phase-aggregated cost estimator that reconstructs episode-level cost estimates from short rollout batches. We further incorporate finite-sample uncertainty and distribution mismatch into a constraint-tightening framework, yielding a scalable Safe RL method compatible with on-policy optimization. Using an MJX-based implementation of Safety Gym, our experiments show that the proposed method achieves performance comparable to non-massively parallel implementations while substantially reducing wall-clock training time.