arXiv Machine Learning

SafeExplorer: An Unbiased Policy Gradient for Reinforcement Learning with Recovery Interventions

arXiv:2607. 08925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training reinforcement-learning agents directly on physical robots makes every fall costly, since a fall can damage the platform and cannot be undone like a simulator reset; the goal is therefore to minimize falls during training rather than trade them off against return, as constrained Markov decision process (MDP) formulations do.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Directional-Clamp PPO

arXiv:2511. 02577v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is widely regarded as one of the most successful deep reinforcement learning algorithms, known for its robustness and effectiveness across a range of problems.

By Gilad Karpel, Ruida Zhou, Shoham Sabach, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

LoRA Scaffolded Policy Optimization (LSPO): A Sampling-Time Low-Rank Scaffold for Recovering Reinforcement-Learning Gradient on Zero-Reward Cliff Prompts

arXiv:2607. 27787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) for mathematical reasoning suffers from a structural blind spot: on "cliff" prompts-those on which every sampled rollout in a group fails-the group-normalized advantage is identically zero, so GRPO produces no gradient on precisely the prompts at the frontier of the model's capability.

By Ken Ding
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

LoRA Scaffolded Policy Optimization (LSPO): A Sampling-Time Low-Rank Scaffold for Recovering Reinforcement-Learning Gradient on Zero-Reward Cliff Prompts

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) for mathematical reasoning suffers from a structural blind spot: on "cliff" prompts-those on which every sampled rollout in a group fails-the group-normalized advantage is identically zero, so GRPO produces no gradient on precisely the prompts at the frontier of the model's capability. We introduce LoRA Scaffolded Policy Optimization (LSPO), a sampling-time mechanism that recovers this lost gradient.

arXiv AI
Jun 6

Retry Policy Gradients in Continuous Action Spaces

arXiv:2606. 05888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retry-based objectives such as pass@K and max@K optimize the best return obtained from multiple sampled trajectories, and recent work has shown that they can promote exploration without explicit exploration bonuses.

By Soichiro Nishimori, Paavo Parmas
arXiv AI
Jun 16

Direction-Conditioned Policies via Compositional Subgoal Scoring for Online Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 16515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman theory implies that the optimal goal-conditioned action depends on the goal only through the gradient of the goal-reaching distance at the current state, yet standard online GCRL still conditions the actor on the raw goal -- a signal that is geometrically uninformative when the goal is far from the data distribution.

By Swaminathan S K, Damiya Gondha, Theyanesh Eswaramoorthy Rajahkrishnan, Aritra Hazra
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

OGPO: Sample Efficient Full-Finetuning of Generative Control Policies

arXiv:2605. 03065v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative control policies (GCPs), such as diffusion- and flow-based control policies, have emerged as effective parameterizations for robot learning.

By Sarvesh Patil, Mitsuhiko Nakamoto, Manan Agarwal, Shashwat Saxena, Jesse Zhang, Giri Anantharaman, Cleah Winston, Chaoyi Pan, Douglas Chen, Nai-Chieh Huang, Zeynep Temel, Oliver Kroemer, Sergey Levine, Abhishek Gupta, Hongkai Dai, Paarth Shah, Max Simchowitz