arXiv:2605. 11020v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is typically formulated as maximizing entropy subject to matching the distribution of expert trajectories.
By Anish Diwan, Davide Tateo, Christopher E. Mower, Haitham Bou-Ammar, Jan Peters, Oleg Arenz
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:2606. 02194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distilling expert demonstration data into large generative models using behavioral cloning is a scalable approach to learning capable policies for robotic control, particularly for dexterous manipulation.
By Christian Scherer, Joe Watson, Theo Gruner, Daniel Palenicek, Ingmar Posner, Jan Peters
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
The paper introduces Bidirectional Behavior Prior Distillation (B2PD), a method that uses action‑value priors to train a conditional variational autoencoder for generating high‑value behavior support. These expert behavior priors are then distilled into the online reinforcement learning agent, reducing inefficient exploration and stabilizing policy updates. Experiments on state‑ and pixel‑based tasks show that B2PD improves sample efficiency while maintaining stable learning dynamics.
By Gong Gao, Xiao Lai, Jiaji Shen, Ning Jia, Xianhui Liu, Weidong Zhao
arXiv:2606. 07367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as powerful controllers for interactive agents in complex environments, yet training them to perform reliable long-horizon decision making remains a fundamental challenge.
By Yudi Zhang, Meng Fang, Zhenfang Chen, Mykola Pechenizkiy
The paper introduces Q-Target Pretrained Transformers (QTPT), a method that replaces supervised behavior cloning with a Bellman-style Q‑target objective for in‑context reinforcement learning. QTPT retains the context‑conditioned Transformer architecture but learns to estimate action values using rewards and transitions from the context, rather than merely imitating offline actions. The authors provide theoretical analysis in stochastic linear bandits and finite‑horizon MDPs, demonstrating improved robustness to weak or suboptimal data, and empirically show gains over supervised pretraining on controlled RL benchmarks and extensions to D4RL Kitchen and AntMaze.
By Yichen Lin, Xuyuan Xiong, Xue Wang, Xiangfu Meng, Mike Mingcheng Wei, Tao Yao
arXiv:2608.20909v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Offline RL methods commonly jointly train the actor and critic, where the critic is used to guide the actor toward higher-value actions. This coupled l...
By Xuyao Lin, Yixiang Shan, Jinru Duan, Tao Yang, Xinyu Zhao, Runyu Lei, Yiming Zhao, Jiaxin Fan, Zongbao Feng, Peng Jia
The paper introduces Reward Stimulation Implicit Q-Learning (RSIQL), a non-hierarchical approach to improve offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning. RSIQL adds auxiliary reward signals at intermediate states that are predicted to aid progress toward the goal, thereby reducing the delay in training supervision. Experiments on D4RL goal-reaching benchmarks and OGBench demonstrate that RSIQL outperforms baseline goal-conditioned IQL and rivals hierarchical offline methods while maintaining a simple flat policy structure.
By Jing Zhang
arXiv:2609. 03241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A reasoning model can improve from its own on-policy experience, but this inner loop is fragile: terminal verifiers provide reliable yet sparse supervision, while dense same-model guidance can reinforce false confidence or overconcentrate learning on a narrow solution mode.
By Zixun Huang, Kishan Panaganti, Haitao Mi, Leowei Liang
arXiv:2607. 08647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As autonomous agents are increasingly deployed across diverse operational contexts, aligning their behavior with human intent demands reward functions that remain robust to such changes rather than overfitting to any single environment.
By Ali Larian, Qian Lin, Chang Zong Wu, Daniel S. Brown
The paper introduces Diffusion-Augmented Markov Decision Processes (DA‑MDPs), a framework that extends Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning to diffusion-based policies. DA‑MDPs treat each reverse‑diffusion step as an RL decision, deriving a tractable reverse‑KL bound that decomposes across denoising transitions and yields diffusion‑augmented soft rewards, value functions, and policy objectives. The authors implement this framework with PPO, REPPO, and a maximum‑entropy WPO variant, showing improved continuous‑control performance, higher success rates on manipulation tasks, and memory‑efficient training with action chunking.
By Sebastian Sanokowski, Kaustubh Patil, Majid Khadiv