arXiv AI

Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Unobservable Random Delays

arXiv:2506. 14411v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In standard reinforcement learning (RL) settings, the interaction between the agent and the environment is typically modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP), which assumes that the agent observes the system state instantaneously, selects an action without delay, and executes it immediately.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 26

Learning to Act While Waiting: RL Finetuning of Generalist Robot Policies Under Inference Latency

The paper introduces ARLI, a latency‑aware framework that enables reinforcement learning fine‑tuning of large generalist robot policies despite inference delays. ARLI combines asynchronous inference with state augmentations—incorporating committed actions and mid‑inference observations—to restore near‑Markovian dynamics and maintain reactivity. Experiments on simulated and real‑world manipulation tasks show that ARLI allows effective policy improvement under latency, outperforming standard RL even in no‑latency scenarios.

By Brian Zhu (Siemens), Momen Khalil (Siemens), E Harrison (UC Berkeley), Emanuele Poggi (Siemens), Philipp Schmitt (Siemens), Bernd Kast (Siemens), Philine Meister (Siemens), Pranav Atreya (UC Berkeley), Qiyang Li (UC Berkeley), Finn Ferchau (Siemens), Cesar Colmenero (Siemens), Yash Shahapurkar (Siemens), Gokul Narayanan (Siemens), Melih Erdogan (Siemens), Kai Wurm (Siemens), Georg von Wichert (Siemens), Oier Mees (Microsoft, ETH Zurich, UC Berkeley), Eugen Solowjow (Siemens), Andrew Wagenmaker (UC Berkeley), Sergey Levine (UC Berkeley)
arXiv AI
Sep 4

From Prior-Guided Heuristics to Deployable Agents: Accelerating Demonstration-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Deadline-Constrained Network Control

The paper proposes a deployment‑focused framework for deadline‑constrained network control, introducing the Effective Congestion (EC) metric family and Uniform Path Grouping (UPG) heuristic to better capture traffic urgency and balance load. It integrates these with a Multi‑Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning architecture (MADRL EC (p*)) that combines a distributed scheduler and a centralized RL router. A unified training objective merges live‑reward, pre‑collected‑reward, and policy‑imitation terms, leading to the Model‑Guided Annealed Reinforcement Learning (MGA‑RL) protocol built on DDPG, which generalizes offline‑to‑online learning for demonstration‑driven training.

By Vincenzo Norman Vitale, Mohammad Solki, Antonia Maria Tulino, Andreas F. Molisch, Jaime Llorca
arXiv AI
3d ago

Higher-Order Action Supervision Makes A Strong Policy Class

The paper proposes a new loss scheme that simultaneously supervises zeroth- and first-order actions to improve policy performance and control robustness in data-driven decision-making methods such as imitation learning and reinforcement learning. The approach provides formal theoretical guarantees, works with any off-the-shelf policy model, and can be added as a lightweight plug‑and‑play module to existing offline RL frameworks. Experiments on OGBench and D4RL show significant gains in performance, robustness, and out‑of‑distribution generalization, especially in low‑data settings.

By Peng Cheng, Yunxian Hou, Zhi Zhou, Qian Zhang, Chang Huang, Xianyuan Zhan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Reinforcement Learning for Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Policies

The paper presents Real‑Time EXPO‑FT, a reinforcement learning framework that fine‑tunes large Vision‑Language‑Action models for real‑time robotic control. It separates slow, expressive action generation from fast, reactive edits, allowing a lightweight policy to adjust actions based on the latest observation. Experiments on the Kinetix benchmark and four dynamic real‑world tasks show that Real‑Time EXPO‑FT achieves superior performance, improving policy success rates from 42% to 97% with only ten minutes of online data and no human intervention.

By Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn