arXiv Machine Learning

Path-Coupled Bellman Flows for Distributional Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605. 08253v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) models the full return distribution, but existing finite-support or quantile-based methods rely on projections, while recent flow-based approaches can suffer from \emph{boundary mismatch} at the flow source or from \emph{high-variance} bootstrapping when current and successor noises are independent.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

Value Flows

arXiv:2510. 07650v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While most reinforcement learning methods today flatten the distribution of future returns to a single scalar value, distributional RL methods exploit the return distribution to provide stronger learning signals and to enable applications in exploration and safe RL.

By Perry Dong, Chongyi Zheng, Chelsea Finn, Dorsa Sadigh, Benjamin Eysenbach
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 AI
Jun 11

Generalizing Beyond Suboptimality: Offline Reinforcement Learning Learns Effective Scheduling through Random Solutions

arXiv:2509. 10303v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Online reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have demonstrated strong performance on Job Shop Scheduling (JSP) and Flexible JSP (FJSP) problems by learning scheduling policies through direct interaction with simulated environments.

By Jesse van Remmerden, Zaharah Bukhsh, Yingqian Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

Distributional Soft Bellman Operator under the Cram\'er Geometry

arXiv:2607. 17897v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distributional soft policy iteration (DSPI) provides an important framework for combining distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) with maximum-entropy control, in which the policy evaluation step is governed by a distributional soft Bellman operator acting on entropy-regularised returns.

By Keru Wang, Yixin Deng, Yao Lyu, Stephen Redmond, Shengbo Eben Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Diffusion Policy with Behavioral Advantage Correction for Offline Reinforcement Learning

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.

By Botao Dong, Longyang Huang, Ning Pang, Hongtian Chen