arXiv Machine Learning

Enhancing Q-Value Updates in Deep Q-Learning via Successor-State Prediction

arXiv:2511. 03836v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep Q-Networks (DQNs) estimate future returns by learning from transitions sampled from a replay buffer.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

Space-sampled Value Decay: Forgetting Mechanisms for Non-stationary Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 11797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Studies on rodents such as mice have shown the capabilities to adapt their behavior when dealing with changing parameters (``drift'') of the environment even if no information about change is provided (uncertainty) -- a behavior that can be modeled by forgetting mechanisms.

By Felix St\"orck, Fabian Hinder, Barbara Hammer
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 10

Discovering Interpretable Multi-Parameter Control Policies for Evolutionary Algorithms Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 10129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While deep Reinforcement Learning (deep-RL) has been increasingly applied to parameter control in evolutionary algorithms, rigorous theoretical analysis of parameter control remains largely restricted to single-parameter settings, owing to the difficulty of deriving effective, interpretable multi-parameter policies amenable to formal study.

By Tai Nguyen, Phong Le, Carola Doerr, Nguyen Dang
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

Space-sampled Value Decay: Forgetting Mechanisms for Non-stationary Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces Space-sampled Value Decay (SsVD), a forgetting mechanism designed for non-stationary reinforcement learning where the environment can drift at every timestep. SsVD selectively pulls value estimates of randomly chosen state-space elements toward a baseline, discarding outdated information without requiring reset or change-point detection. Integrated into Soft Actor Critic and Deep Q-Networks, SsVD outperforms its base algorithms across six non-stationary environments and can also promote optimism in hard-exploration tasks.

By Felix St\"orck, Philipp Hartmann, Fabian Hinder, Klaus Neumann, Barbara Hammer
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

From Weak Data to Strong Policy: Q-Targets Enable Provable In-Context Reinforcement Learning

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 AI
Jun 16

QPILOTS: Efficient Test-Time Q-Steering for Flow Policies

arXiv:2606. 14801v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow-matching and diffusion policies are expressive action generators, but optimizing them with temporal-difference reinforcement learning (RL) remains difficult.

By Yifan Ruan, Chenyang Cao, Andreas Burger, Ali Pesaranghader, Kaveh Kamali, Jaehong Kim, Nandita Vijaykumar, Alan Aspuru-Guzik, Igor Gilitschenski, Nicholas Rhinehart