arXiv AI

When Does Feedback Help? Auditing Learned Voltage-Clamp Experimental Design

arXiv AI
Sep 12

When Validation Stops Learning: Auditing Update Admission for Continual Embodied Agents

The paper introduces an admission‑audit protocol for continual embodied agents, arguing that update admission should balance error control with retained learning opportunities within a fixed interaction budget. It critiques a range‑based confidence gate for failing to certify unchanged old‑task behavior, and proposes a paired‑binomial construction that reduces this burden when outcome disagreements are rare. Experiments on a one‑step pushing diagnostic show that fresh paired checks admit a significant portion of updates while the range‑based gate admits none, and a learned‑dynamics stress test helps distinguish model bias from feedback‑selection error.

By Qinzhen Ma, Ruihai Wu
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 12

Cross-Behavior Policy Optimization: Unified Learning from Offline Demonstrations and On- and Off-Policy Rollouts via a Shared Regression Target

The paper introduces Cross-Behavior Policy Optimization (CBPO), a method that unifies offline demonstrations and policy-generated rollouts into a single regression loss using a fixed-reference target. CBPO eliminates the need for separate supervised fine‑tuning and reinforcement learning objectives, allowing positive and negative offline completions, reference responses, and current and historical rollouts to share a common reward‑labeled format and replay buffer. Experiments on two model scales and four mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that CBPO, especially the CBPO‑Unified variant, outperforms baseline methods in avg@32 and pass@32 metrics, with historical rollouts providing additional gains.

By Du Cheng, Junyu Lu, Jingfan Zhang, Yuzhuo Zhang, Haoxuan Jia, Shichao Weng
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Don't Mask the Environment: Observation Supervision Changes How Agents Explore Under RL

The paper introduces ActObs, a supervised fine‑tuning method that, unlike standard approaches, also predicts environment observations in agent trajectories. While both ActObs and action‑only training perform similarly after initial fine‑tuning, ActObs diverges during subsequent reinforcement learning, yielding higher pass@k scores on several benchmarks and better cross‑domain task performance. The authors attribute this advantage to ActObs’s joint supervision, which preserves observation gradients and prevents the policy from over‑specializing on actions alone.

By Juzheng Zhang, Disha Makhija, Manoj Ghuhan Arivazhagan, Vinayshekhar Bannihatti Kumar, Rashmi Gangadharaiah
arXiv Machine Learning
21h ago

An Explicit Feedback Contract for Iterative ML-Agent Harnesses

arXiv:2610.28798v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Iterative ML agents develop models by editing code, running experiments, reading a validation score, and choosing what to try next. In current harnesse...

By Kehui Yao, Chuanbo Hu, Jiao Chen, Ramin Giahi, Reza Yousefi Maragheh, Lalitesh Morishetti, Ziwei Hong, Yiyun Su, Jianpeng Xu, Evren Korpeoglu, Kannan Achan
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Nous: Learning and Certifying Memory Decisions Before Source Calibration

The paper introduces Nous, a framework that separates learning, calibration, and revision certification for belief‑based agent memory. It shows that learning and certifying useful memory decisions can require quadratically fewer records than source calibration, and provides finite‑sample certificates for policy improvement without needing to recover source reliability. Experiments on MiniGrid environments demonstrate that the new certificate reliably accepts improvements over incumbents, outperforming earlier methods.

By Pranav Singh
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Online Surrogate Repair: Decoupling High-Fidelity Feedback from Search Length in Closed-Loop Discovery

The paper introduces Online Surrogate Repair (OSR), a closed‑loop algorithm that decouples the frequency of high‑fidelity evaluations from the length of an agent’s search by selectively updating a surrogate model with sparse, high‑fidelity data. An acquisition rule determines which candidate designs receive expensive evaluations, and the resulting labels refine the surrogate for subsequent episodes. Experiments on synthetic environments and the MADE benchmark show that OSR can reduce regret more efficiently than fixed‑surrogate approaches, requiring fewer oracle queries than high‑fidelity feedback after every episode.

By Xiaotang Feng, Philip Torr, Bruno Andreis
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