Pre-training followed by fine-tuning has become the dominant recipe for learning performant policies, and in value-based reinforcement learning (RL) this raises a natural question: given a pretrained policy, should the Q-function be pretrained on offline data too? Conventional wisdom suggests it should, but recent results show that online RL with a randomly-initialized Q-function can result in highly performant and reliable policies without needing to pretrain the Q-function.
arXiv:2510. 01460v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a practical paradigm that leverages offline datasets for pretraining and online interactions for fine-tuning.
By Lu Li, Tianwei Ni, Yihao Sun, Pierre-Luc Bacon
arXiv:2608. 10473v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline-to-online (O2O) reinforcement learning aims to leverage policies pretrained on static datasets while improving them through online interaction.
By Daoyi Li, Yixian Zhang, Chao Yu, Wenbo Ding, Yu Wang
arXiv:2607. 21302v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavior prior reinforcement learning (BPRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm to improve sample efficiency in online reinforcement learning (RL) by leveraging policy priors derived from offline demonstrations.
By Gong Gao, Weidong Zhao, Xianhui Liu, Ning Jia
arXiv:2607. 11720v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Background: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables effective policies to be trained from large, previously collected datasets and subsequently improved through limited online interaction.
By Alper Kamil Bozkurt, Shangtong Zhang, Yuichi Motai
arXiv:2607. 28916v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multistep credit assignment is critical for sample-efficient reinforcement learning, yet managing off-policy bias in Q-learning remains a fundamental challenge.
By Brett Daley
arXiv:2602. 17632v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods find performant actor-critics, however, fine-tuning these actor-critics online with value-based RL algorithms typically causes immediate drops in performance.
By Nathan Samuel de Lara, Florian Shkurti
arXiv:2606. 15333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM unlearning has emerged as a cost-effective alternative to full retraining for removing hazardous knowledge from pretrained models while preserving general utility.
By Zirui Pang, Chenlong Zhang, Haosheng Tan, Zhuoran Jin, Jiaheng Wei, Zixin Zhong
arXiv:2608. 15088v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human-in-the-loop (HIL) online reinforcement learning for real robots must absorb human interventions quickly while continuing to improve beyond the human prior.
By Zihang Wang, Yishan Wang
arXiv:2510. 19528v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the fundamental problem of leveraging offline data to accelerate online reinforcement learning - a direction with strong potential but limited theoretical grounding.
By Sebastian Reboul, H\'el\`ene Halconruy
Background: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables effective policies to be trained from large, previously collected datasets and subsequently improved through limited online interaction. This offline-to-online RL (O2O-RL) paradigm is particularly promising in nonstationary domains where interaction is costly or potentially hazardous.
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