arXiv:2606. 01123v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) avoids explicit reward engineering by learning from pairwise human preference feedback.
By Jun-Jie Yang, Chia-Heng Hsu, Kui-Yuan Chen, Ping-Chun Hsieh
arXiv:2606. 32027v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reward design remains a central bottleneck for autonomous robot policy improvement, especially in long-horizon manipulation tasks where sparse success labels provide too little signal and binary preferences collapse many competing notions of quality into one ambiguous signal.
By Marcel Torne, Anubha Mahajan, Abhijnya Bhat, Chelsea Finn
LIBERO-PeRM is a benchmark for studying personalized robotic manipulation, focusing on how policies learn and follow user preferences in zero‑shot settings, from demonstrations, and across varying tasks and layouts. It introduces a taxonomy of language‑expressible preferences—motion, skill, and user‑profile choices—within the LIBERO simulation framework, generating 312 tasks with paired demonstrations and preference‑satisfaction metrics. Experiments reveal that current vision‑language‑action policies struggle with zero‑shot personalization, while supervised fine‑tuning improves learnability, yet challenges remain in generalization, decomposition, and conflict handling.
By Zhixu Li, Keqian Tang, Litian Gong, Jingyu Yao, Wenqian Zhang, Tianze Xu, Zehao Wang, Yuping Wang, Junge Zhang, Jiachen Li
arXiv:2606. 11982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) learns policies from human trajectory-level comparisons, avoiding explicit reward design and expert demonstrations.
By Aleksandar Taranovic, Onur Celik, Niklas Freymuth, Ge Li, Serge Thilges, Huy Le, Tai Hoang, Rania Rayyes, Gerhard Neumann
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
arXiv:2603. 05296v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) allows robots to learn from offline datasets without risky exploration.
By Hokyun Im, Andrey Kolobov, Jianlong Fu, Youngwoon Lee
The paper introduces a minimal‑data adaptation regime where a pretrained robot policy learns a new task from a single demonstration followed by autonomous online interaction. It shows that while zero‑shot performance is poor, one demonstration can guide the policy toward coarse task‑following, and identifies key design principles—pretrained VLA representations for sample‑efficient value learning, residual policy learning for corrective behavior, and data‑balancing to avoid exploration collapse. The proposed MiDAS method, combining few‑demonstration behavior cloning with value‑based residual learning over frozen VLA representations, significantly boosts task success on LIBERO, RoboCasa, and a bimanual YAM platform after only a few hours of online interaction.
By Shreyas Kowshik, Sreyas Venkataraman, Leo Wang, Niharika Pant, Max Simchowitz, Aviral Kumar
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.
By Chenyang Cao, Miguel Rogel-Garc\'ia, Mohamed Nabail, Xueqian Wang, Nicholas Rhinehart
arXiv:2605.11151v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) improves sample efficiency by leveraging pre-collected datasets prior to online interaction. A key ch...
By Andrew Choi, Wei Xu
SynIL is a new framework for offline imitation learning that automatically assesses the quality of demonstration data without requiring labels. It uses motor synergy—a low‑dimensional coordinated movement pattern linked to proficiency—to generate dense, transition‑level reward signals through self‑supervised reward regression. Experiments on D4RL locomotion and Robomimic manipulation datasets show that synergy‑derived rewards align well with true rewards and that SynIL outperforms Behavior Cloning and rivals or surpasses offline reinforcement learning in sparse‑reward scenarios.
By Yuto Tanaka, Kyo Kutsuzawa, Martina Doku, Dai Owaki, Mitsuhiro Hayashibe
arXiv:2506. 13741v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) has emerged as a promising approach for learning behaviors from human feedback without predefined reward functions.
By Brahim Driss, Alex Davey, Riad Akrour
arXiv:2603.16065v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown strong potential for improving robotic manipulation policies, yet its practical use remains bottlenecke...
By Yanru Wu, Weiduo Yuan, Esteban Martinez Licon, Ang Qi, Vitor Guizilini, Jiageng Mao, Yue Wang