arXiv:2608. 02332v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In offline reinforcement learning (RL), the distribution shift between behavioral data and the learned policy can lead to erroneous \emph{Q}-value estimation, thereby misguiding the direction of policy optimization.
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...
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.
arXiv:2609.40149v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Policy regularization in offline reinforcement learning balances policy improvement against reliance on uncertain value estimates. This balance can dif...
arXiv:2608. 14430v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training provides a direct way to align diffusion models with human preferences and task-specific rewards.
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.
arXiv:2609.38955v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) aims to recover a reward function that explains expert demonstrations. Existing IRL methods typically rely on a...
arXiv:2610.02198v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Several state-of-the-art methods for online reinforcement learning in continuous control improve policies using action gradients of a learned critic....
arXiv:2609.06882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion policies offer a powerful and expressive parameterization for continuous control. Yet, their integration with reinforcement learning remain...
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 00350v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning requires improving a policy from fixed data while avoiding out-of-distribution actions with unreliable value estimates.
The paper investigates how different estimators of the reverse Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence used as a regularization term in reinforcement learning (RL) training of large language models (LLMs) affect training stability and downstream performance. By analyzing gradient bias across various estimator configurations, the authors demonstrate that biased gradients can cause training instabilities, while unbiased configurations improve performance on both in‑domain and out‑of‑domain tasks. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑7B, Llama‑3.1‑8B‑Instruct, and Qwen3‑4B‑Instruct‑2507 confirm these findings and show that KL regularization also stabilizes off‑policy RL training in asynchronous setups.