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Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 2026

Test-time Risk Adaptation with Mixture of Agents

Mohamad Chehade, Amrit Singh Bedi, Souradip Chakraborty, Amy Zhang, Hao Zhu

Abstract

Deployed reinforcement learning agents often face safety requirements that are specified only after training: new hazard maps, revised risk thresholds, or behavioral alignment constraints. We study zero-update deployment-time adaptation in which a fixed library of risk-neutral source policies must be 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 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 to a reference behavior, and local volatility risks specified at test time. We make the surrogate nature of the method explicit: TRAM is not claimed to solve the full occupancy-control problem of the stitched policy, but it 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 improves deployment risk while preserving reward and requires no parameter updates at test time.

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