[Paper] Who Earns the Safety? Intervention-Aware Quantum Predictive Control with Safety Attribution
Source: arXiv - 2606.09778v1
Overview
Hard safety filters are increasingly placed downstream of learned controllers to guarantee constraint satisfaction at run time. Yet a filtered controller that never violates a constraint may still have learned nothing about safety: the filter can silently repair an incompetent upstream policy, so that post-filter success measures the filter, not the policy. We argue that safe policy learning should ask who earns the safety - the policy or its protective layers - and we make this question measurable. We introduce Intervention-Aware Variational Quantum Differentiable Predictive Control (IA-VQC-DPC), which (i) trains a compact variational quantum circuit (VQC) policy under a primal-dual intervention budget that penalizes reliance on a differentiable Control-Barrier-Function (CBF) projection, and (ii) is evaluated with a safety-attribution protocol that decomposes the executed-trajectory correction into a CBF term and a deployment runtime-guard term, and stress-tests the policy with guard-off evaluation. On closed-loop, high-fidelity BOPTEST building-control emulators (5 seeds, 60 episodes per method), intervention-aware training significantly lowers the quantum policy’s raw pre-filter violation and total safety-layer reliance (both p < 10^-4) with no significant energy regression; at an equal approximately 400-parameter budget the quantum policy is significantly safer and more comfortable than a matched classical policy. Guard-off evaluation confirms the improvement is policy-level and exposes a valuable negative result: a learned differentiable energy head is only safe when paired with a distribution-aware runtime guard. The attribution protocol is general beyond quantum policies and buildings.
Key Contributions
This paper presents research in the following areas:
- quant-ph
- cs.AI
Methodology
Please refer to the full paper for detailed methodology.
Practical Implications
This research contributes to the advancement of quant-ph.
Authors
- Yifan Wang
Paper Information
- arXiv ID: 2606.09778v1
- Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI
- Published: June 8, 2026
- PDF: Download PDF