arXiv Machine Learning

Memory Merge DQN: Sensitivity Weighted Target Updates for Stable Value Learning

arXiv:2607. 19397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep Q-networks use target networks to stabilise bootstrapped value learning, but the standard hard copy update also introduces a tradeoff.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

Do You Really Need to Pretrain Q-Functions for Online RL Fine-Tuning?

arXiv:2607. 27203v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-training followed by fine-tuning has become the dominant recipe for learning performant policies, and in value-based reinforcement learning (RL) this raises a natural question: given a pretrained policy, should the Q-function be pretrained on offline data too?

By Perry Dong, Ron Polonsky, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Fin
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

Do You Really Need to Pretrain Q-Functions for Online RL Fine-Tuning?

Pre-training followed by fine-tuning has become the dominant recipe for learning performant policies, and in value-based reinforcement learning (RL) this raises a natural question: given a pretrained policy, should the Q-function be pretrained on offline data too? Conventional wisdom suggests it should, but recent results show that online RL with a randomly-initialized Q-function can result in highly performant and reliable policies without needing to pretrain the Q-function.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 22

Stale but Stable: Staleness-Adaptive Trust Regions for Stabilizing Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2607. 18722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning improves throughput by decoupling rollout generation from optimization, but staleness is an inevitable byproduct compounded by policy lag, engine delays, and mixture-of-experts routing.

By Junyao Yang, Yucheng Shi, Zongxia Li, Zhongzhi Li, Ruhan Wang, Xiangxin Zhou, Kishan Panaganti, Haitao Mi, Leowei Liang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 21

Stale but Stable: Staleness-Adaptive Trust Regions for Stabilizing Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning

Asynchronous reinforcement learning improves throughput by decoupling rollout generation from optimization, but staleness is an inevitable byproduct compounded by policy lag, engine delays, and mixture-of-experts routing. From a trust-region perspective, this mismatch is critical: training-inference divergence governs approximation error in finite-horizon bounds, whereas PPO clipping only gates sampled outward updates, acting as a sampled surrogate rather than a full-policy constraint.

arXiv AI
Jul 24

SOAP, Muon, and Beyond: Pushing LLM Pretraining Scales

arXiv:2607. 20548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Higher-order optimizers such as Muon and SOAP offer faster convergence than AdamW, but their computational cost and numerical stability challenges have limited adoption at scale.

By Mikail Khona, Aditya Vavre, Boxiang Wang, Deyu Fu, Hao Wu, Mike Chrzanowski, Bryan Catanzaro, Dheevatsa Mudigere, Jeff Pool, Michael Lightstone, Mohammad Shoeybi, Mostofa Patwary, Nima Tajbakhsh, Tijmen Blankevoort