arXiv Machine Learning

Learning-Guided Sparsification of Dynamic Graphs in Robotic Exploration

arXiv:2604. 16509v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many robotic exploration algorithms rely on graph structures for frontier-based exploration and dynamic path planning.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 8

Learning to build covering structures with continuous adjustments

The paper presents a reinforcement learning method, HSAC, that builds covering structures without relying on rigid, pre‑planned sequences. It uses graph‑structured state representations and a mixed action space to select blocks and adjust their placement continuously, while an efficient exploration strategy incorporates unilateral edges into graph neural networks. HSAC outperforms the prior hybrid‑PPO approach, shows strong sample efficiency, robustness to hyperparameters, and successfully transfers policies from simulation to a real two‑robot 3D‑printed block construction task.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Learning to build covering structures with continuous adjustments

The paper presents HSAC, a reinforcement learning method that builds covering structures without predefined plans, using graph-structured states and a mixed action space of discrete block selection and continuous placement. It extends soft actor-critic with unilateral edges in graph neural networks to efficiently explore while simulating stability. Experiments show HSAC outperforms hybrid-PPO, remains robust to hyperparameters, and successfully transfers to a real two-robot 3D‑printed arch construction.

By Gabriel Vallat, Maryam Kamgarpour, Stefana Parascho
arXiv AI
Jun 19

Flickering Multi-Armed Bandits

arXiv:2602. 17315v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Flickering Multi-Armed Bandits (FMAB) to model sequential decision-making in environments with changing action availability, where accessibility of the next action is restricted to a subset dependent on the agent's current choice.

By Sourav Chakraborty, Amit Kiran Rege, Claire Monteleoni, Lijun Chen
arXiv Statistics ML
3d ago

Learning to Plan from Random Exploration

arXiv:2609.38383v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Random exploration reveals how an environment can be traversed before a goal is specified. Can this experience support long-range planning without po...

By Deqian Kong, Guangyan Sun, Sheng Cheng, Sirui Xie, Bo Pang, Jianwen Xie, Tony Geng, Caiwen Ding, Ying Nian Wu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 17

Expected Free Energy-based Informative Path Planning for Robotic Mars Exploration

arXiv:2608. 14466v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: An autonomous robot efficiently exploring an unknown environment, such as looking for water sources on Mars, faces two simultaneous demands: building an accurate information map while quickly finding the regions of greatest value, and paying for every meter of travel and the cost of every measurement it takes.

By Ajith Anil Meera, Pablo Lanillos, Wouter Kouw
arXiv AI
Aug 13

TMRL: Diffusion Timestep-Modulated Pretraining Enables Exploration for Efficient Policy Finetuning

arXiv:2605. 12236v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning pre-trained robot policies with reinforcement learning (RL) often inherits the bottlenecks introduced by pre-training with behavioral cloning (BC), which produces narrow action distributions that lack the coverage necessary for downstream exploration.

By Matthew M. Hong, Jesse Zhang, Anusha Nagabandi, Abhishek Gupta
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

GEM-MPC: Balancing Exploration and Exploitation through Expert-Guided Planning

GEM-MPC is a reinforcement learning method that blends MPPI planning with policy learning to balance exploration and exploitation in high-dimensional continuous control tasks. It trains a policy to clone the planner while also maintaining a KL-regularized policy that explores around the planner’s suggestions, thereby improving the synergy between planning and learning. The approach introduces Gated Prior Distillation, which selectively updates policies from stored planning distributions only when they offer better targets, reducing the influence of stale data without costly reanalysis. Across continuous-control benchmarks, GEM-MPC outperforms existing planning-based baselines while using lower computational budgets.

By Alvaro Serra-Gomez, Thomas Moerland