The paper introduces Q-Target Pretrained Transformers (QTPT), a method that replaces supervised behavior cloning with a Bellman-style Q‑target objective for in‑context reinforcement learning. QTPT retains the context‑conditioned Transformer architecture but learns to estimate action values using rewards and transitions from the context, rather than merely imitating offline actions. The authors provide theoretical analysis in stochastic linear bandits and finite‑horizon MDPs, demonstrating improved robustness to weak or suboptimal data, and empirically show gains over supervised pretraining on controlled RL benchmarks and extensions to D4RL Kitchen and AntMaze.
By Yichen Lin, Xuyuan Xiong, Xue Wang, Xiangfu Meng, Mike Mingcheng Wei, Tao Yao
arXiv:2605. 11020v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is typically formulated as maximizing entropy subject to matching the distribution of expert trajectories.
By Anish Diwan, Davide Tateo, Christopher E. Mower, Haitham Bou-Ammar, Jan Peters, Oleg Arenz
arXiv:2607. 08647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As autonomous agents are increasingly deployed across diverse operational contexts, aligning their behavior with human intent demands reward functions that remain robust to such changes rather than overfitting to any single environment.
By Ali Larian, Qian Lin, Chang Zong Wu, Daniel S. Brown
arXiv:2609.38955v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) aims to recover a reward function that explains expert demonstrations. Existing IRL methods typically rely on a...
By Yang chen, Yitan Zhang, Michael Witbrock, Shuyue Hu
arXiv:2608. 06445v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Capturing the strategic decision-making inherent in competitive human driving is critical for autonomous vehicle safety and traffic simulation.
By Yu Song
arXiv:2607. 21302v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavior prior reinforcement learning (BPRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm to improve sample efficiency in online reinforcement learning (RL) by leveraging policy priors derived from offline demonstrations.
By Gong Gao, Weidong Zhao, Xianhui Liu, Ning Jia
The paper introduces BUMEX, a reinforcement learning exploration strategy that leverages a set of prior models containing the true transition kernel and reward function. By optimizing over this model set, the method derives upper and lower bounds on the Q‑function to guide exploration, providing theoretical guarantees of convergence to the optimal policy. When the model set follows a bounded‑parameter MDP structure, the optimization becomes convex, enabling finite‑time convergence under mild assumptions and demonstrating accelerated learning in simulations.
By J. S. van Hulst, W. P. M. H. Heemels, D. J. Antunes
arXiv:1808. 07645v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The 20 Questions (Q20) game is a well known game which encourages deductive reasoning and creativity.
By Huang Hu, Xianchao Wu, Bingfeng Luo, Chongyang Tao, Can Xu, Wei Wu, Zhan Chen
arXiv:2401. 11512v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Identifying the most suitable variables to represent the state is a fundamental challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL).
By Charles Westphal, Stephen Hailes, Mirco Musolesi
arXiv:2606. 17551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Iterative generative modeling techniques, such as flow matching, provide powerful tools to model complex behaviors for effective offline reinforcement learning (RL).
By Aditya Oberai, Seohong Park, Sergey Levine
The paper introduces Reward Ensemble under Confidence (REC), a probabilistic reward learning framework for preference-based reinforcement learning that models per‑timestep reward uncertainty using an ensemble of distributional reward models. REC incorporates uncertainty into the preference loss and uses model disagreement to drive exploration, achieving 88.4% of shaped‑reward performance on acrobatic quadrotor control versus 55.2% with standard Preference PPO. The authors train policies in simulation and transfer them zero‑shot to real quadrotors, demonstrating complex acrobatic maneuvers learned solely from human preference feedback, and validate REC on a continuous‑control benchmark.
By Colin Merk, Ismail Geles, Jiaxu Xing, Angel Romero, Giorgia Ramponi, Davide Scaramuzza
arXiv:2606. 02194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distilling expert demonstration data into large generative models using behavioral cloning is a scalable approach to learning capable policies for robotic control, particularly for dexterous manipulation.
By Christian Scherer, Joe Watson, Theo Gruner, Daniel Palenicek, Ingmar Posner, Jan Peters