TRAM: Test-Time Risk Adaptation with Mixture of Agents
Abstract
Deployed reinforcement learning agents often face safety requirements that are specified only after training, such as new hazard maps, revised risk thresholds, or behavioral alignment constraints. We study zero-update deployment-time adaptation, where a fixed library of risk-neutral source policies is reused under a newly specified reward-risk tradeoff. We propose TRAM (Test-Time Risk Adaptation via Mixture of Agents), a source-scored composition rule that evaluates each source policy under the target reward and an occupancy-based deployment risk, then selects actions using risk-adjusted source scores. Unlike training-time risk-sensitive methods tied to a fixed surrogate such as return variance, TRAM supports spatial barrier exposure, divergence from a reference behavior, and local volatility risks specified at test time. We explicitly characterize TRAM as a surrogate method: it does not solve the full occupancy-control problem of the stitched policy, but admits a measurable source-hull mismatch term connecting source-scored risk to realized risk. Experiments in gridworlds, MuJoCo Reacher, Safety-Gymnasium, and an LLM alignment setting show that TRAM reduces deployment risk while preserving reward, without requiring any parameter updates at test time.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2408.08812,
title = {TRAM: Test-Time Risk Adaptation with Mixture of Agents},
author = {Mohamad Fares El Hajj Chehade and Amrit Singh Bedi and Amy Zhang and Hao Zhu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.08812},
year = {2026}
}