arXiv:2508. 14751v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study goal-conditioned reinforcement learning in partially observable environments with sparse rewards and large, structured goal spaces.
The paper investigates how curriculum learning affects reinforcement learning in a minimal policy learning model. It shows that when rewards are dense, curricula offer only marginal benefits, but when rewards are sparse, curricula become essential for learning to occur. The study also highlights that competing objectives—minimizing effort versus maximizing reward—create distinct optima that curricula can help navigate by reducing reward sparsity and reshaping the reward landscape.
arXiv:2606. 07367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as powerful controllers for interactive agents in complex environments, yet training them to perform reliable long-horizon decision making remains a fundamental challenge.
arXiv:2608. 08604v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a powerful framework for solving complex collaborative tasks, but it relies heavily on well-defined global reward functions.
arXiv:2602. 21534v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning (ARL) has rapidly gained attention as a promising paradigm for training agents to solve complex, multi-step interactive tasks.
The paper introduces SAGE, a framework that selectively queries a Vision‑Language Model (VLM) teacher only when the learner is uncertain, using the teacher’s suggestions to guide training and distill them into a lightweight reinforcement learning policy. SAGE weights teacher actions by environment‑derived advantages, allowing the policy to improve beyond the imperfect VLM. Experiments on sparse‑reward visual reasoning and navigation tasks show that the learned policies can act without VLM guidance at evaluation, reduce VLM usage during training, and sometimes outperform the teacher itself.
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.
Wayfarer is a domain‑agnostic, online deep RL agent that discovers options via Laplacian representation learning from high‑dimensional observations and uses them for control. The discovered options improve exploration, accelerate credit assignment, and generalise to unseen settings, leading to faster learning of complex policies. Wayfarer achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance among single‑stream agents on the most challenging Atari 2600 games, especially those requiring long‑horizon exploration such as Montezuma's Revenge and Private Eye.
The paper introduces Residual Reward Models (RRM) to enhance preference‑based reinforcement learning (PbRL) in robotics. RRMs decompose the true reward into a prior component—such as a heuristic, language‑generated, or IRL‑derived reward—and a learned residual that is trained with human preferences. Experiments on Meta‑World, DM‑Control, and a physical Franka Panda robot show that RRMs markedly improve sample efficiency and accelerate policy learning compared to standard PbRL methods.
AUSO (Action-level Unified Skill Optimization) is a method that unifies skill learning and skill use through a progressive, action-aware optimization process. It starts by jointly learning from teacher guidance and environmental outcomes, then shifts to outcome-based policy optimization, and finally evaluates each action under skill-conditioned and skill-free contexts to strengthen beneficial skill-sensitive actions while suppressing harmful ones. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and SearchQA demonstrate that AUSO consistently improves agent performance and out-of-distribution generalization compared to competitive baselines.
arXiv:2609.36393v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) techniques focus on maximizing expected cumulative reward, where each action assumes to take a constant unit...
arXiv:2602. 08335v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools via multi-agent systems offers a promising new paradigm for decomposing and solving complex problems.