arXiv AI

Max-Q Selective Imitation for Human-in-the-Loop Online Robot Learning

arXiv:2608. 15088v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human-in-the-loop (HIL) online reinforcement learning for real robots must absorb human interventions quickly while continuing to improve beyond the human prior.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

From Pretraining to Proficiency: Real-World Subtask RL for Long-Horizon Manipulation with Minimal Human Intervention

The paper introduces PARTS, a real‑world subtask reinforcement learning framework that fine‑tunes a pretrained robot policy by focusing on critical bottleneck subtasks while keeping the base policy frozen. It uses agent‑generated selectors and success verifiers to provide local rewards, enabling learning even when full‑task successes are rare. Experiments on bimanual YAM and single‑arm Franka robots show that PARTS raises complete‑task success from 32% to 61% and from 50% to 95%, respectively, with only tens of minutes of real‑world RL rollouts and minimal human intervention.

By Sichang Su, Benjamin Yang, Zhiyun Deng, Boyuan Liang, Yip Fun Yeung, Zelin Wang, Lingfeng Sun
arXiv AI
2d ago

DriftOPD: Sequence-Level Reverse-KL Distillation for One-Step VLA Policies

DriftOPD is a teacher‑free, rollout‑free framework that performs sequence‑level on‑policy distillation of continuous Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) action experts. It decomposes the sequence‑level reverse‑KL divergence into a chunk‑level reverse‑KL term and a future‑potential term, optimizing them with a one‑step drifting objective and a Q‑function critic learned from offline demonstrations. Experiments on multiple VLA architectures in simulation and real‑world manipulation show that DriftOPD outperforms existing one‑step distillation baselines while matching the task success of multi‑step teacher policies.

By Youngjun Jun, Kyumin Choi, Youngmin Kim, Seonghyun Jin, Sunwoo Park, Jangho Park, Jong Chul Ye
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

From Weak Data to Strong Policy: Q-Targets Enable Provable In-Context Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces Q-Target Pretrained Transformers (QTPT), a method that replaces supervised behavior cloning with a Bellman-style Q‑target objective for in‑context reinforcement learning. QTPT retains the context‑conditioned Transformer architecture but learns to estimate action values using rewards and transitions from the context, rather than merely imitating offline actions. The authors provide theoretical analysis in stochastic linear bandits and finite‑horizon MDPs, demonstrating improved robustness to weak or suboptimal data, and empirically show gains over supervised pretraining on controlled RL benchmarks and extensions to D4RL Kitchen and AntMaze.

By Yichen Lin, Xuyuan Xiong, Xue Wang, Xiangfu Meng, Mike Mingcheng Wei, Tao Yao
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 AI
Aug 19

Q-Learning With World Models

The paper introduces QWM, a framework that integrates world models with standard Q‑learning to perform test‑time search over imagined trajectories. By training the policy and value function solely on real transitions, QWM avoids compounding model bias while still benefiting from predictive search. Experiments on the Robomimic and LIBERO manipulation benchmarks show that QWM outperforms strong prior state‑of‑the‑art methods in both sample efficiency and performance.

By Perry Dong, Yueru Jia, Chelsea Finn, Dorsa Sadigh
arXiv AI
Sep 24

BEE: Intervention-Adaptive Real-World Reinforcement Learning with Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2609.27450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models handle long-horizon manipulation, yet success hinges on a few precision-critical phases where millimeter-scale er...

By Weihui Zhao, Xiaohan Yan, Zunian Wan, Xuan Du, Zhaozhan Chi, Jianbo Mao, Ruipu Wu, Rushuai Yang, Houlin Li, Shukai Yang, Jing Wu, Yuxiang Yan, Yongcheng Liu, Chuankang Li, Guanghui Ren, Wei Shan, Maoqing Yao