Asymmetric actor critic for image-based robot learning

Residual Reward Models: Leveraging Prior Knowledge for Efficient Preference-based Reinforcement Learning in Robotics

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.

Implicit Drifting Policy: One-Step Action Generation via Conditional Expert Geometry

arXiv:2606. 01098v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative action policies based on diffusion or flow matching excel in behavior cloning, yet their iterative sampling is prohibitive for high-frequency robot control.

Lipschitz-Regularized Critics Lead to Policy Robustness Against Transition Dynamics Uncertainty

arXiv:2404. 13879v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Uncertainties in transition dynamics pose a critical challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), often resulting in performance degradation of trained policies when deployed on hardware.

Squint: Fast Visual Reinforcement Learning for Sim-to-Real Robotics

Squint is a visual Soft Actor Critic algorithm designed to accelerate reinforcement learning for robotics. It combines parallel simulation, a distributional critic, resolution squinting, layer normalization, a tuned update-to-data ratio, and an optimized implementation to reduce wall‑clock training time. On the SO‑101 Task Set, Squint trains policies in as little as 15 minutes on a single RTX 3090 GPU, with most tasks converging in under 6 minutes and successfully transferring to a real SO‑101 robot.

Test-Time Gradient Guidance of Flow Policies in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 11087v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expressive continuous control policies, such as diffusion and flow models, form the backbone of recent advances in scaling imitation learning for simulated and real robot control.

Second-Order Actor-Critic Methods for Discounted MDPs via Policy Hessian Decomposition

arXiv:2605. 14982v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We address the discounted reward setting in reinforcement learning (RL).

Pretraining in Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning for Locomotion

arXiv:2510. 12363v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The pretraining-finetuning paradigm has facilitated numerous transformative advancements in artificial intelligence research in recent years.

Disagreement-Regularized Imitation Learning for Image-Based Continuous Control with Gaussian and Beta Policies

arXiv:2609.38407v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Purpose: Behavior cloning can accumulate errors when a learned controller visits states outside the demonstrated distribution. This study evaluates whe...

From Demonstrations to Rewards: Test-Time Prompt Optimization for VLM Reward Models

arXiv:2606. 00083v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning relies on accurate reward functions, which are often hand-crafted or even unavailable in real-world applications, such as robotics.

One-shot imitation learning

Advantage Actor Critic (A2C)

Foundations of Reinforcement Learning and Control:Connections and New Perspectives

arXiv:2608. 02433v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning and control theory are two adjacent scientific fields that focus on optimizing the controller of unknown dynamical systems using feedback.