arXiv:2510. 19244v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (RL) achieves remarkable performance but lacks interpretability, limiting trust in policy behavior.
By Yiyu Qian, Su Nguyen, Chao Chen, Qinyue Zhou, Liyuan Zhao
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:2507. 15356v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) learns policies from fixed datasets, thereby avoiding costly or unsafe environment interactions.
By Lu Guo, Yixiang Shan, Zhengbang Zhu, Qifan Liang, Lichang Song, Ting Long, Weinan Zhang, Yi Chang
arXiv:2601. 19612v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe exploration is a key requirement for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn and adapt online, beyond controlled (e.
By Manuel Wendl, Yarden As, Manish Prajapat, Anton Pollak, Stelian Coros, Andreas Krause
arXiv:2607. 07235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Explainability remains a key issue in reinforcement learning (RL).
By Ignacio D. Lopez-Miguel, Ezio Bartocci, Thomas Eiter, Martin Tappler
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:2511. 03836v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep Q-Networks (DQNs) estimate future returns by learning from transitions sampled from a replay buffer.
By Lipeng Zu, Hansong Zhou, Xiaonan Zhang
arXiv:2608. 10386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sample-efficient reinforcement learning for autonomous driving is often limited by the trade-off between data efficiency and model bias.
By Jiazhuo Li, Linjiang Cao, Qi Liu, Xi Xiong
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
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. 05481v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit a classic "chicken-and-egg" problem in reinforcement learning: to safely improve a policy, the value function must be accurate on the state-visitation distribution of the updated policy.
By Dillon Sandhu, Ronald Parr
arXiv:2609.15544v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Enabling human stakeholders to specify reward functions that lead to their desired outcomes is a key challenge in deploying reinforcement learning ag...
By Stephane Hatgis-Kessell, W. Bradley Knox, Emma Brunskill