The paper introduces Bidirectional Voronoi-biased Exploration Curriculum (BVER), a method that expands start states from the goal and goals from the initial state simultaneously, guiding both toward each other to train a single goal-conditioned policy. Inspired by bidirectional RRT planning, BVER biases exploration toward unexplored task space and steers the two expansions together. Experiments on point-mass mazes, quadrupedal box climbing, and robot-arm ring-on-peg transfer show that BVER learns faster than other reference-free curricula, achieving high success rates and robustness without requiring demonstrations.
By Juri Pfammatter, Kaixian Qu, Clemens Schwarke, Victor Klemm, Marco Hutter
The paper introduces Planning Diffusion Policy Optimization (PDPO), an offline‑to‑online reinforcement‑learning framework that employs a diffusion policy to produce short‑horizon action chunks for robot crowd navigation. PDPO is pretrained on collision‑avoidance demonstrations and fine‑tuned online with PPO, generating five‑step action sequences applied in a receding‑horizon manner. The authors also identify a benchmark artifact where agents can leave the valid domain without explicit boundary constraints, and they mitigate this by treating boundary violations as collisions, leading to improved success rates over strong baselines.
By Wendong Li, Jochen Garcke
arXiv:2608. 05588v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding (LMAPF) requires repeatedly planning collision-free paths for agents that continuously receive new goals upon reaching their current ones.
By He Jiang, Jingtian Yan, Yulun Zhang, Yimin Tang, Tanishq Duhan, Rishi Veerapaneni, Guillaume Sartoretti, Jiaoyang Li
arXiv:2608. 11363v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central goal in robot learning is to move beyond task-specific human data collection toward robots that improve through autonomous interaction.
By Shreyas Kowshik, Sreyas Venkataraman, Leo Wang, Niharika Pant, Max Simchowitz, Aviral Kumar
The paper introduces Hybrid Belief Reinforcement Learning (HBRL), a two‑phase framework for coordinating multiple autonomous agents in spatial exploration tasks. In phase one, agents build spatial beliefs via a Log‑Gaussian Cox Process and plan information‑driven trajectories using a Pathwise Mutual Information planner; in phase two, a Soft Actor‑Critic policy is warm‑started through dual‑channel knowledge transfer that incorporates belief states and replay‑buffer demonstrations. Experiments on UAV wireless service provisioning and NYC taxi demand sensing show significant performance gains, with the dual‑channel transfer outperforming single‑channel approaches.
By Danish Rizvi, David Boyle
The paper introduces RBGA, an algorithm for offline-to-online safe reinforcement learning in dexterous manipulation. RBGA tracks the remaining safety budget during an episode and uses it to arbitrate between offline guidance and an evolving online policy, comparing cost-to-go estimates at each step. The authors provide theoretical analysis of safety implications and demonstrate through experiments that RBGA improves online policy performance while preserving safety.
By Zongyou Yu, Ao Zhou, Xiongbo Shi, Jiayi Guan, Shihang Du, Xudong Zhang, Shangding Gu, Junqiao Zhao, Hanli Wang, Guang Chen
arXiv:2604. 12474v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In many robotic tasks, agents must traverse a sequence of spatial regions to complete a mission.
By Lidor Erez, Shahaf S. Shperberg, Ayal Taitler
arXiv:2603. 28385v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Maritime surveillance missions, such as search and rescue and environmental monitoring, rely on the efficient allocation of sensing assets over vast and geometrically complex areas.
By Carlos S. Sep\'ulveda, Gonzalo A. Ruz
arXiv:2604. 16509v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many robotic exploration algorithms rely on graph structures for frontier-based exploration and dynamic path planning.
By Adithya V. Sastry, Bibek Poudel, Weizi Li
ASTEROID is a student–teacher supervised learning framework that learns efficient test‑time exploration in partially observable sequential decision problems. By training a history‑conditioned student on on‑policy contexts while a privileged expert provides action labels conditioned on that history, the student learns to search while uncertain and exploit once the hidden state is revealed. Across eleven diverse environments, ASTEROID achieves roughly twice the returns under fixed exploration budgets, uses about 100× fewer interactions than reinforcement learning baselines, and transfers well to vision‑denied real‑world robot manipulation, improving success by +40% over standard distillation.
By Sriyash Poddar, Yanda Bao, Jacob Krantz, Matthew Chang, Xavier Puig, Roozbeh Mottaghi, Natasha Jaques, Abhishek Gupta
arXiv:2607. 12784v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning has revolutionized the landscape of robotic research, allowing robust learning of complex robotic skills in simulation.
By Paolo Magliano, Puze Liu, Jan Peters, Davide Tateo, Raffaello Camoriano
arXiv:2606. 16480v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world must plan motions across diverse scenarios without per-scenario retuning.
By Youngjae Min, Jovin D'sa, Faizan M. Tariq, David Isele, Navid Azizan, Sangjae Bae