arXiv:2605. 04568v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: State-of-the-art model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches either use gradient-free, population-based methods for planning, learned policy networks, or a combination of policy networks and planning.
By Jonathan Spieler, Sven Behnke
The paper introduces Multi‑Fidelity Policy Gradient (MFPG) methods that combine scarce, high‑fidelity (HF) reinforcement‑learning data with abundant, low‑fidelity (LF) data to stabilize training. Unlike prior approaches that directly optimize biased LF objectives, MFPG uses LF data only to construct a control variate that reduces variance without biasing the policy gradient. The authors extend MFPG to modern actor‑critic algorithms, notably a budget‑aware MFPG‑PPO that preserves cross‑fidelity correlation, monitors estimator uncertainty, and allocates a fixed sampling budget between HF and LF sources. Experiments on simulated robot locomotion and a physical Franka arm show that MFPG‑PPO consistently outperforms standard PPO trained on HF data alone and matches performance achieved with 16× more HF data on the hardest tasks, while enabling stable learning with as few as four real‑robot episodes per update.
By Xinjie Liu, Ruihan Zhao, Anirban Chaudhuri, Cyrus Neary, Ufuk Topcu, David Fridovich-Keil
arXiv:2607. 18830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) is a widely used framework for reinforcement learning (RL) that enables efficient transfer by learning global policy parameters that can be rapidly adapted to new tasks.
By Garvit Singla, Uma Maheswari Natarajan, Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi
arXiv:2510. 17709v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Training Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies using simulation models before deployment in real-world environments is a common strategy when real-world interaction is expensive.
By Akhil S Anand, Shambhuraj Sawant, Paavo Parmas, Jasper Hoffmann, Dirk Reinhardt, Sebastien Gros
arXiv:2605. 20256v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning has become a cornerstone for aligning and unlocking the reasoning capabilities of large-scale models.
By Xikai Zhang, Yongzhi Li, Likang Xiao, Yingze Zhang, Yanhua Cheng, Quan Chen, Peng Jiang, Wenjun Wu, Liu Liu
arXiv:2608. 02951v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) for general stochastic MDPs often requires training a reward model.
By Evan Assmus, Qining Zhang, Lei Ying
arXiv:2606. 08779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a pivotal post-training paradigm, yet it frequently suffers from unpredictable sub-optimum performance or even training collapses.
By Jiashun Liu, Runze Liu, Xu Wan, Jing Liang, Hongyao Tang, Ling Pan
Agentic ESOpt proposes using evolution strategies (ES) instead of reinforcement learning to fine‑tune large language‑model agents for long‑horizon tasks. ES offers model scalability, flexibility, and better long‑horizon credit assignment, enabling full‑parameter optimization with minimal GPU memory. The framework samples parameter perturbations, evaluates agents with rewards, and updates online, achieving notable performance gains on WebArena‑Lite and in test‑time prompt‑parameter co‑evolution.
By Zhi Zheng, Rongsheng Chen, Yunpeng Ba, Zhenkun Wang, Yee Whye Teh, Wee Sun Lee
BCPPO is a new variant of Proximal Policy Optimization that uses Bachelier-inspired cost‑prediction networks to generate a smooth penalty based on disagreement among critics. The method keeps temporal‑difference learning unchanged, applies a saturation‑aware controller to manage cost penalties, and deploys only the policy network. Across extensive experiments, BCPPO outperforms comparators in achieving higher mean returns while maintaining lower or comparable CVaR in all tested tasks.
By Dongsheng Hou, Yanqiao Chen, Yuhan Rui
arXiv:2601. 00898v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based policies have gained growing popularity in solving a wide range of decision-making tasks due to their superior expressiveness and controllable generation during inference.
By Ruiming Liang, Yinan Zheng, Kexin Zheng, Tianyi Tan, Jianxiong Li, Liyuan Mao, Zhihao Wang, Guang Chen, Hangjun Ye, Jingjing Liu, Jinqiao Wang, Xianyuan Zhan
The paper introduces Trajectory-Aware Policy Optimization (TAPO), a new framework for reinforcement learning that addresses the state distribution shift caused by long-horizon autoregressive rollouts in large language models. TAPO derives a state-distribution correction from the off-policy policy gradient, integrates it into the RL objective, and uses a geometric-mean estimator for variance reduction along with length-aware dynamic clipping to stabilize updates. Experiments on eight competition-level benchmarks show TAPO outperforms existing LLM RL methods, achieving up to 48% improvement on mathematical reasoning and 12% on algorithmic coding tasks while enhancing training stability.
By Zhicheng Cai, Weinan Dai, Yuyan Zhou, Wei-Ying Ma, Ya-Qin Zhang, Hao Zhou
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.
By Zhiyuan Zhou, Andy Peng, Charles Xu, Qiyang Li, Tobias Springenberg, Kevin Frans, Sergey Levine