The paper introduces a reinforcement learning framework that selects among a portfolio of gradient‑based and derivative‑free optimizers during a run. At each decision point a recurrent policy reads the current run state and chooses both the next optimizer and its usage duration, passing the best solution and step size forward. The method is trained with a decoupled actor‑critic using the same runtime distribution metric as evaluation, and on unseen problems it outperforms all individual portfolio optimizers except at the smallest budgets, remaining robust to distribution shift.
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.
The paper introduces Task Specialization Fine-Tuning (TSFT), an online framework that allocates a limited fine‑tuning budget across multiple task regions in Contextual Reinforcement Learning. TSFT predicts fine‑tuning performance with a simple parametric model and solves the budget allocation problem exactly using integer linear programming. Experiments on combinatorial optimization, continuous control, and LLM fine‑tuning show that TSFT outperforms baselines in task coverage and approaches oracle performance.
arXiv:2607. 10694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the problem of optimal continual fine-tuning for a pre-trained Foundation Model deployed at a resource-limited device.
arXiv:2605. 11020v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is typically formulated as maximizing entropy subject to matching the distribution of expert trajectories.
arXiv:2606. 00151v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In reinforcement learning (RL), agents benefit from exploration only because they repeatedly encounter similar states: trying different actions can improve performance or reduce uncertainty; without such retries, a greedy policy is optimal.
arXiv:2606. 01081v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision-focused learning (DFL) trains predictive models by optimizing downstream decision quality rather than standalone prediction accuracy.
HyCO is a hybrid neural solver that combines a sequential reinforcement learning (RL) solver with a global diffusion model (DM) to tackle combinatorial optimization problems. The RL component builds an initial solution prefix, after which HyCO switches to a conditional DM to finish the remaining decisions. The authors provide a theoretical framework showing that this hybrid approach yields lower expected regret than either method alone, identify an optimal trigger step for the switch, and implement a lightweight adaptive trigger based on policy entropy and RL‑DM disagreement, achieving consistent performance gains across benchmarks.
arXiv:2608. 09805v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Exploration has been a focus of reinforcement learning research for a long time.
arXiv:2406.03678v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy reinforcement learning methods, like Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), often demand extensi...
arXiv:2601. 19810v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised pre-training can equip reinforcement learning agents with prior knowledge and accelerate learning in downstream tasks.
arXiv:2606. 09825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training reinforcement learning (RL) policies from scratch is costly: it requires careful reward and environment design, extensive tuning, and substantial computation.
arXiv:2605. 05481v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit a classic "chicken-and-egg" problem in reinforcement learning: to safely improve a policy, the value function must be accurate on the state-visitation distribution of the updated policy.