arXiv AI

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.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Persistent Robot World Models: Stabilizing Multi-Step Rollouts via Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces a reinforcement learning post‑training scheme that trains robot world models on their own autoregressive rollouts, using a contrastive RL objective adapted from diffusion models. It also proposes a training protocol that compares multiple variable‑length futures, a multi‑view visual fidelity reward, and demonstrates state‑of‑the‑art rollout fidelity on the DROID dataset, outperforming baselines on LPIPS, SSIM, and human preference tests.

By Jai Bardhan, Patrik Drozdik, Josef Sivic, Vladimir Petrik
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

Latent Spherical Flow Policy for Reinforcement Learning with Combinatorial Actions

arXiv:2601. 22211v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) with combinatorial action spaces remains challenging because feasible action sets are exponentially large and governed by complex feasibility constraints, making direct policy parameterization impractical.

By Lingkai Kong, Anagha Satish, Hezi Jiang, Akseli Kangaslahti, Andrew Ma, Wenbo Chen, Mingxiao Song, Lily Xu, Milind Tambe
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 26

Reinforcement Fine-Tuning of Flow-Matching Policies for Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2510. 09976v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models such as OpenVLA, Octo, and $\pi_0$ have shown strong generalization by leveraging large-scale demonstrations, yet their performance is still fundamentally constrained by the quality and coverage of supervised data.

By Mingyang Lyu, Yinqian Sun, Erliang Lin, Huangrui Li, Ruolin Chen, Feifei Zhao, Yi Zeng
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Action abstractions for amortized sampling

The paper introduces a method that integrates action abstraction into policy optimization for reinforcement learning and generative flow networks. By iteratively identifying frequently used action subsequences in high‑reward trajectories and treating them as single high‑level actions, the approach expands the action space and improves sample efficiency. Experiments on synthetic and real‑world tasks show that this technique discovers diverse high‑reward states more effectively, especially on challenging exploration problems, and yields interpretable abstract actions that reflect the underlying reward structure.

By Oussama Boussif, L\'ena N\'ehale Ezzine, Joseph D Viviano, Micha{\l} Koziarski, Moksh Jain, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Emmanuel Bengio, Rim Assouel, Yoshua Bengio
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Improving Online Reinforcement Learning via Bidirectional Behavior Prior Distillation

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.

By Gong Gao, Xiao Lai, Jiaji Shen, Ning Jia, Xianhui Liu, Weidong Zhao
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 Computer Vision
Sep 14

PAVXploreRL: Physical-Action-Visual World Model Reinforcement Learning with Action Exploration

PAVXploreRL introduces a reinforcement learning framework that builds on a pretrained latent world model to explicitly optimize Physical Plausibility, Action Adherence, and Visual Fidelity (PAV) objectives. By combining in‑distribution expert trajectories with noise‑driven out‑of‑distribution action exploration, the method avoids reliance on paired video supervision and improves generalization. Experiments demonstrate a 5.6% average performance gain over pretrained baselines and more reliable policy evaluation with reduced overestimation bias.

By Han Wang, Zijun Wang, Shuoshuo Xue, Rui Cao, Fengjiao Chen, Xiaodan Liang, Roy Ka-Wei Lee