arXiv AI

SPOTting the Future: Lookahead Explanations for Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2608. 09967v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents achieve strong performance in complex environments, yet their decision-making processes remain difficult to interpret.

arXiv AI
Jun 15

Deep Dense Exploration for LLM Reinforcement Learning via Pivot-Driven Resampling

arXiv:2602. 14169v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Effective exploration is a key challenge in reinforcement learning for large language models: discovering high-quality trajectories within a limited sampling budget from the vast natural language sequence space.

By Yiran Guo, Zhongjian Qiao, Yingqi Xie, Jie Liu, Dan Ye, Ruiqing Zhang, Shuang Qiu, Lijie Xu
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Behavior-Consistent Deep Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces the concept of behavior-consistent deep reinforcement learning, aiming to produce high-performing policies that remain distributionally similar across different training runs. It shows that maximum-entropy RL can control behavioral divergence by anchoring runs to a common prior, and proves that for Boltzmann policies, a temperature proportional to Q‑function disagreement limits pairwise KL divergence. Building on this, the authors propose Q‑value Expectile Disagreement (QED), a state‑dependent temperature schedule that uses double‑critic disagreement to approximate cross‑run disagreement, and demonstrate that QED reduces across‑run divergence by two orders of magnitude on 18 continuous‑control tasks without sacrificing performance.

By Marcel Hussing, Liv G. d'Aliberti, Claas Voelcker, Benjamin Eysenbach, Eric Eaton
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Imagine-then-Plan: Agent Learning from Adaptive Lookahead with World Models

The paper introduces Imagine-then-Plan (ITP), a framework that lets agents learn by interacting with a learned world model to generate multi-step imagined trajectories. ITP features an adaptive lookahead mechanism that balances ultimate goals with task progress, producing richer signals about future outcomes. Experiments on various benchmarks show that ITP outperforms existing baselines, and analyses suggest the adaptive lookahead improves reasoning for complex tasks.

By Youwei Liu, Jian Wang, Hanlin Wang, Beichen Guo, Wenjie Li
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

From Weak Data to Strong Policy: Q-Targets Enable Provable In-Context Reinforcement Learning

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