arXiv AI

Vector Symbolic Policy Gradient

Vector Symbolic Policy Gradient (VSPG) is a discrete-action actor that encodes each action as a unit‑norm hypervector and evaluates it by similarity to the encoded state. Its policy‑gradient update reduces to advantage‑weighted hypervector bundling followed by normalization, enabling the use of standard advantage estimators. The learned action hypervectors act as fixed‑size compressed kernel memories that store advantage‑weighted expansions over visited states, allowing evidence transfer via encoder‑induced similarity and providing a robustness guarantee for greedy action selection under random bit flips.

arXiv AI
Oct 12

Stochastic MeanFlow Policies: One-Step Generative Control with Entropic Mirror Descent

The paper introduces Stochastic MeanFlow Policies (SMFP), a one‑step generative policy class that merges MeanFlow noise‑to‑action mappings with Gaussian reparameterisation. SMFP captures diverse action modes while providing an analytic entropy lower bound through a learnable conditional Gaussian scale, enabling entropy‑regularised mirror‑descent learning. Experiments on seven MuJoCo benchmarks show SMFP outperforming Gaussian and generative baselines, and additional tests demonstrate effective multimodal action modelling and exploration in sparse‑reward navigation.

By Zeyuan Wang, Da Li, Yulin Chen, Yuehu Gong, Yanming Guo, Liang Bai, Tianyuan Yu, Yanwei Fu
arXiv AI
Jun 6

Retry Policy Gradients in Continuous Action Spaces

arXiv:2606. 05888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retry-based objectives such as pass@K and max@K optimize the best return obtained from multiple sampled trajectories, and recent work has shown that they can promote exploration without explicit exploration bonuses.

By Soichiro Nishimori, Paavo Parmas
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Unsupervised Behavioral Compression: Learning Low-Dimensional Policy Manifolds through State-Occupancy Matching

arXiv:2603. 27044v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is widely recognized as sample-inefficient, a limitation attributable in part to the high dimensionality and substantial functional redundancy inherent to the policy parameter space.

By Andrea Fraschini, Davide Tenedini, Riccardo Zamboni, Mirco Mutti, Marcello Restelli
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

RN-D: Discretized Categorical Actors for On-Policy Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2601. 23075v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a dominant paradigm for continuous control, yet standard implementations rely on Gaussian actors and relatively shallow MLP policies, often leading to brittle optimization when gradients are noisy, and policy updates must be conservative.

By Yuexin Bian, Jie Feng, Tao Wang, Yijiang Li, Sicun Gao, Yuanyuan Shi
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Learn from the Gap: Differential-Aware Advantage Pruning with Adaptive Rollout Sampling for GRPO

The paper introduces FastRL, a reinforcement learning framework designed to enhance the efficiency of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and its variants. FastRL employs an advantage-aware pruning strategy that retains high-advantage trajectories while preserving gradient diversity, and an adaptive rollout sampling mechanism that adjusts sampling scale during training based on historical pruning data. Experiments show that FastRL can be integrated into GRPO, DAPO, and GSPO, yielding a 2.07× speedup on Geometry3K and GeoQA8K-R1V and a 1.64% accuracy improvement on visual reasoning benchmarks.

By Jiahua Yang, Zhiwei Yang, Xianpeng Zhang, Dongyu Chen, Xing Chen, Tianhuang Su, Haonan Lu, Quanlong Guan, Kai Tang, Chuangchuang Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Diffusion-Augmented Markov Decision Processes for Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces Diffusion-Augmented Markov Decision Processes (DA‑MDPs), a framework that extends Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning to diffusion-based policies. DA‑MDPs treat each reverse‑diffusion step as an RL decision, deriving a tractable reverse‑KL bound that decomposes across denoising transitions and yields diffusion‑augmented soft rewards, value functions, and policy objectives. The authors implement this framework with PPO, REPPO, and a maximum‑entropy WPO variant, showing improved continuous‑control performance, higher success rates on manipulation tasks, and memory‑efficient training with action chunking.

By Sebastian Sanokowski, Kaustubh Patil, Majid Khadiv
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Divide-and-Remember: Recursive Action-Relevant Memory for Long-Horizon VLA Policies

The paper introduces Divide-and-Remember (D&R), a recursive memory method for vision-language-action (VLA) policies that optimises memory by maximizing the conditional mutual information between actions and memory given observations. D&R recursively divides the full history into top‑K selections over 2K tokens, using a shared lightweight selector across all recursion blocks to handle unbounded histories efficiently. Evaluated on the RoboMME benchmark of 16 long‑horizon manipulation tasks, D&R achieves state‑of‑the‑art success rates with consistent gains across all suites while using only 64 tokens, and similar improvements are observed in real‑robot experiments.

By Xuehui Yu, Eason Yu, Meiyi Wang, Haozhe Du, Stefano V. Albrecht, Harold Soh