arXiv AI

Can We Really Learn One Representation to Optimize All Rewards?

arXiv:2602. 11399v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As unsupervised pretraining becomes increasingly ubiquitous in reinforcement learning, a more thorough theoretical understanding of these methods becomes of equal importance to their empirical success.

arXiv AI
Jun 30

Exploration and Online Transfer with Behavioral Foundation Models

arXiv:2606. 29980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zero-shot Transfer in Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent that can generate optimal policies for any reward function, without additional learning at transfer time, while training only on reward-free trajectories.

By Louis Bagot (SyCoSMA), Mathieu Lefort (LIRIS, SyCoSMA, IRISA, MALT, UR), La\"etitia Matignon (SyCoSMA)
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Shift Before You Learn: Enabling Low-Rank Representations in Reinforcement Learning

The paper challenges the common assumption that the successor measure in reinforcement learning is approximately low-rank, showing instead that a low-rank structure emerges in a shifted successor measure that ignores initial transitions. It provides finite-sample guarantees for estimating this low-rank approximation, introduces Type II Poincaré inequalities to bound spectral recoverability, and links the necessary shift to the decay of high-order singular values and local mixing properties. Experiments confirm that shifting the successor measure improves goal-conditioned RL performance.

By Bastien Dubail, Stefan Stojanovic, Alexandre Prouti\`ere
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Decision-Centered Abstractions via Orthogonal Estimation of Difference-of-Q Functions

The paper introduces state abstractions that preserve the difference of Q‑functions for offline reinforcement learning, aiming to exclude irrelevant dynamics from rich state data. It proposes a dynamic generalization of the R‑learner that uses orthogonal estimation and sparse learning to estimate the Q‑function contrast, achieving faster convergence and consistency under a margin condition. Experiments on simulated and simulator‑augmented real data show variance reductions and demonstrate that the necessary information for sequential decision‑making can be smaller than that required for full state prediction.

By Defu Cao, Angela Zhou
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Coherent Off-Policy Improvement of Large Behavior Models with Learned Rewards

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 Machine Learning
Aug 27

Regularized Latent Dynamics Prediction is a Strong Baseline For Behavioral Foundation Models

The paper introduces Regularized Latent Dynamics Prediction (RLDP), a method that adds orthogonality regularization to self‑supervised next‑state prediction in latent space. RLDP maintains feature diversity, matching or surpassing complex representation learning approaches for zero‑shot reinforcement learning. It also performs robustly in low‑coverage data settings where prior methods fail.

By Pranaya Jajoo, Harshit Sikchi, Siddhant Agarwal, Amy Zhang, Scott Niekum, Martha White