arXiv Machine Learning

Learning High-Risk High-Precision Motion Control

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Learning Acrobatic Flight from Preferences

The paper introduces Reward Ensemble under Confidence (REC), a probabilistic reward learning framework for preference-based reinforcement learning that models per‑timestep reward uncertainty using an ensemble of distributional reward models. REC incorporates uncertainty into the preference loss and uses model disagreement to drive exploration, achieving 88.4% of shaped‑reward performance on acrobatic quadrotor control versus 55.2% with standard Preference PPO. The authors train policies in simulation and transfer them zero‑shot to real quadrotors, demonstrating complex acrobatic maneuvers learned solely from human preference feedback, and validate REC on a continuous‑control benchmark.

By Colin Merk, Ismail Geles, Jiaxu Xing, Angel Romero, Giorgia Ramponi, Davide Scaramuzza
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Coherent Off-Policy Improvement of Large Behavior Models with Learned Rewards

arXiv:2606. 02194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distilling expert demonstration data into large generative models using behavioral cloning is a scalable approach to learning capable policies for robotic control, particularly for dexterous manipulation.

By Christian Scherer, Joe Watson, Theo Gruner, Daniel Palenicek, Ingmar Posner, Jan Peters
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 8

SERNF: Sample-Efficient Real-World Dexterous Policy Fine-Tuning via Action-Chunked Critics and Normalizing Flows

arXiv:2602. 09580v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world fine-tuning of dexterous manipulation policies remains challenging due to limited real-world interaction budgets and highly multimodal action distributions.

By Chenyu Yang, Denis Tarasov, Davide Liconti, Romain Guntz, Hehui Zheng, Robert K. Katzschmann
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Reward as Observation: Learning Reward-Based Policies for Rapid Adaptation

The paper proposes a reward-based policy that relies only on rewards and actions, enabling zero‑shot transfer between source and target environments with entirely different observation spaces. Experiments on Pointmass, Cartpole, 2D Car Racing, and the Stretch robot in Habitat‑Sim show that the policy can adapt to new visual styles or 3D renderings without additional samples. Additionally, the reward policy can guide the training of an observation‑based policy in the target environment.

By Morgan Byrd, Maks Sorokin, Robert Wright, Sehoon Ha
arXiv AI
Jun 2

From Demonstrations to Rewards: Test-Time Prompt Optimization for VLM Reward Models

arXiv:2606. 00083v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning relies on accurate reward functions, which are often hand-crafted or even unavailable in real-world applications, such as robotics.

By Christian Gumbsch, Leonardo Barcellona, Lennard Sch\"unemann, Platon Karageorgis, Andrii Zadaianchuk, Zehao Wang, Sergey Zakharov, Fabien Despinoy, Rahaf Aljundi, Efstratios Gavves