arXiv Machine Learning

GEM-MPC: Balancing Exploration and Exploitation through Expert-Guided Planning

GEM-MPC is a reinforcement learning method that blends MPPI planning with policy learning to balance exploration and exploitation in high-dimensional continuous control tasks. It trains a policy to clone the planner while also maintaining a KL-regularized policy that explores around the planner’s suggestions, thereby improving the synergy between planning and learning. The approach introduces Gated Prior Distillation, which selectively updates policies from stored planning distributions only when they offer better targets, reducing the influence of stale data without costly reanalysis. Across continuous-control benchmarks, GEM-MPC outperforms existing planning-based baselines while using lower computational budgets.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

Reinforced Planning with Latent World Models

Reinforced Planning with Latent World Models (RP1) is a novel method that learns to evaluate imagined outcomes via a critic and to improve multi‑step plans through an optimizer trained offline on world‑model roll‑outs. It is the first approach to fully learn plan improvement and can be attached to any pretrained latent world model. In experiments on visual navigation, arm reaching, and robotic manipulation, RP1 outperforms hand‑designed search algorithms, achieving near‑perfect success while using far fewer roll‑outs and running up to 67× faster than the strongest alternative.

By Armin Sommer, Jannik Schilling
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 22

Asymmetric On-Policy Distillation Learns In-Context Exploration

ASTEROID is a student–teacher supervised learning framework that learns efficient test‑time exploration in partially observable sequential decision problems. By training a history‑conditioned student on on‑policy contexts while a privileged expert provides action labels conditioned on that history, the student learns to search while uncertain and exploit once the hidden state is revealed. Across eleven diverse environments, ASTEROID achieves roughly twice the returns under fixed exploration budgets, uses about 100× fewer interactions than reinforcement learning baselines, and transfers well to vision‑denied real‑world robot manipulation, improving success by +40% over standard distillation.

By Sriyash Poddar, Yanda Bao, Jacob Krantz, Matthew Chang, Xavier Puig, Roozbeh Mottaghi, Natasha Jaques, Abhishek Gupta
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 19

Reinforced Planning with Latent World Models

Reinforced Planning with Latent World Models introduces RP1, a neural planner that learns to evaluate imagined outcomes via a critic and improve multi‑step plans through an optimizer trained offline on world‑model roll‑outs. Unlike existing planners that are hand‑designed or only inform policies, RP1 fully learns to refine plans and can be attached to any pretrained latent world model. In experiments on visual navigation, arm reaching, and robotic manipulation, RP1 outperforms hand‑designed search algorithms, achieving near‑perfect success while using 1,000× fewer roll‑outs and up to 67× faster inference.

arXiv AI
Oct 19

Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Policy Improvement via Flow-Reversed Action Anchors

The paper introduces AnchorQ, a method that improves sample-efficient reinforcement learning for policy refinement by using flow-reversed action anchors. AnchorQ maps reference behaviors to state-conditioned latent anchors, samples local particles around these anchors, and employs value-guided sampling to explore promising refinements. Experiments on simulated and real-world manipulation tasks show that AnchorQ outperforms state-of-the-art post-training baselines, achieving a 37% higher real-world success rate and 97% greater simulated task throughput within the same interaction budget.

By Carl Qi, Weijun Dong, Xiaojie Wang, Peiyi Chen, Rahul Sajnani, Mingyuan Zhang, Amy Zhang, Jose Barreiros, Manikatan Nambi, Lillian J. Ratliff, Dylan Randle
arXiv AI
Aug 14

Exploiting Symbolic Heuristics for the Synthesis of Domain-Specific Temporal Planning Guidance using Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2505. 13372v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work investigated the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) for the synthesis of heuristic guidance to improve the performance of temporal planners when a domain is fixed and a set of training problems (not plans) is given.

By Irene Brugnara, Alessandro Valentini, Andrea Micheli