arXiv:2608.20909v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline RL methods commonly jointly train the actor and critic, where the critic is used to guide the actor toward higher-value actions. This coupled l...
arXiv:2607. 11720v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Background: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables effective policies to be trained from large, previously collected datasets and subsequently improved through limited online interaction.
Background: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables effective policies to be trained from large, previously collected datasets and subsequently improved through limited online interaction. This offline-to-online RL (O2O-RL) paradigm is particularly promising in nonstationary domains where interaction is costly or potentially hazardous.
arXiv:2510. 01460v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a practical paradigm that leverages offline datasets for pretraining and online interactions for fine-tuning.
arXiv:2607. 19399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: It is commonly observed that online reinforcement learning (RL) produces better-performing strategies than offline methods across a broad range of performance measures.
arXiv:2601. 15353v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in real-world decision-making across diverse domains, including gaming, robotics, online advertising, public health, and natural language processing.
arXiv:2510. 19528v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the fundamental problem of leveraging offline data to accelerate online reinforcement learning - a direction with strong potential but limited theoretical grounding.
The paper investigates how different estimators of the reverse Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence used as a regularization term in reinforcement learning (RL) training of large language models (LLMs) affect training stability and downstream performance. By analyzing gradient bias across various estimator configurations, the authors demonstrate that biased gradients can cause training instabilities, while unbiased configurations improve performance on both in‑domain and out‑of‑domain tasks. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑7B, Llama‑3.1‑8B‑Instruct, and Qwen3‑4B‑Instruct‑2507 confirm these findings and show that KL regularization also stabilizes off‑policy RL training in asynchronous setups.
The paper introduces Bidirectional Behavior Prior Distillation (B2PD), a method that uses action‑value priors to train a conditional variational autoencoder for generating high‑value behavior support. These expert behavior priors are then distilled into the online reinforcement learning agent, reducing inefficient exploration and stabilizing policy updates. Experiments on state‑ and pixel‑based tasks show that B2PD improves sample efficiency while maintaining stable learning dynamics.
Pre-training followed by fine-tuning has become the dominant recipe for learning performant policies, and in value-based reinforcement learning (RL) this raises a natural question: given a pretrained policy, should the Q-function be pretrained on offline data too? Conventional wisdom suggests it should, but recent results show that online RL with a randomly-initialized Q-function can result in highly performant and reliable policies without needing to pretrain the Q-function.
arXiv:2502. 19544v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Leveraging offline data is a promising way to improve the sample efficiency of online reinforcement learning (RL).
arXiv:2607. 27203v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-training followed by fine-tuning has become the dominant recipe for learning performant policies, and in value-based reinforcement learning (RL) this raises a natural question: given a pretrained policy, should the Q-function be pretrained on offline data too?