DexDICE: Reconciling Safety and Performance via Dual-Expert Offline Imitation Learning

Abstract

Ensuring high returns while providing strong safety guarantees in offline imitation learning (IL) is a fundamental challenge: existing approaches either rely on explicitly specified cost functions, which are difficult to design for complex real-world safety constraints, or require expert demonstrations that are both safe and high-performing, which are often too costly to collect. We introduce dual-expert imitation learning, which leverages two complementary data sources: (i) safety-compliant demonstrations that faithfully follow safety guidelines but may be suboptimal, and (ii) performance-oriented demonstrations that achieve high returns but may violate safety guidelines. To address this problem, we propose DexDICE (Dual-expert offline imitation learning via stationary DIstribution Correction Estimation). Instead of conventional distribution constraints, DexDICE combines DICE-style offline learning with safe support constraints, enabling agents to exploit high-return behaviors while remaining within safety-compliant regions. We prove that the ideal solution satisfying this constraint exactly has zero unsafe-region visitation with high probability. We evaluate DexDICE on a re-curated DSRL benchmark and validate it on a real-world mobile-robot navigation task trained directly from human teleoperation demonstrations, where it substantially outperforms baselines and remains robust to data scarcity and quality degradation.