arXiv Machine Learning

rl_rob: A transparent, from-scratch Python library for teaching reinforcement learning from tabular methods to deep policy gradients

rl_rob is an open‑source Python library designed for teaching reinforcement learning, covering a full curriculum from tabular temporal‑difference learning to deep value‑based and policy‑gradient methods. Every algorithm is implemented from first principles, making the update rules transparent and concise. The library provides a unified interface for all agents, enabling direct comparison across stages and allowing students to implement, modify, and explain update rules rather than merely producing working code.

arXiv AI
Sep 17

RLLBC-Lib: An Educational Code Library for Reinforcement Learning and Learning-Based Control

RLLBC-Lib is an educational code library designed to lower the entry barrier for students learning reinforcement learning (RL) in the context of learning-based control. It offers a comprehensive collection of tabular RL methods to reinforce theoretical foundations, followed by a deep RL library that mirrors the same design principles to highlight parallels between simple and state‑of‑the‑art approaches. The library also includes implementations that illustrate core RL principles, contrast RL with other learning‑based control methods, and serve as a foundation for programming assignments with automated grading.

By Bernd Frauenknecht, Emma Cramer, Artur Eisele, Paul Kruse, Lukas Kesper, Jonas Hertrampf, Ramil Sabirov, Jyotirmaya Patra, Johannes Berger, Paul Brunzema, Friedrich Solowjow, Sebastian Trimpe
OpenAI Blog
Apr 27, 2016

OpenAI Gym Beta

We’re releasing the public beta of OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. It consists of a growing suite of environments (from simulated robots to Atari games), and a site for comparing and reproducing results.

arXiv AI
Oct 16

Progress Reward Model for Reinforcement Learning via Large Language Models

The paper introduces PRM4RL, a framework that combines task planning and dense reward generation using large language models for reinforcement learning. It decomposes complex tasks into manageable subtasks and employs a fine‑grained progress function to monitor execution, which is then used to construct a Progress Reward Model for potential‑based reward shaping. Experiments on robotics control tasks show that PRM4RL outperforms existing LLM‑based planning and reward methods, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance.

By Xiuhui Zhang, Ning Gao, Xingyu Jiang, Yihui Chen, Yuheng Pan, Mohan Zhang, Yue Deng
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 7

QF3: Fast Flow RL with Filtered Q-Gradients

QF3 (Fast Flow RL with Filtered Q-Gradients) is an online off‑policy reinforcement learning algorithm that trains flow policies by combining flow matching with the critic’s action gradient, backpropagated through a one‑step prediction of the flow output. It selectively applies the critic gradient only to action dimensions close to the replay action to ensure reliable updates. QF3 is the first off‑policy flow RL method to train humanoid locomotion policies from scratch and transfer them zero‑shot to hardware, achieving a 10× wall‑clock speedup over the on‑policy FPO++ method, and it can also fine‑tune pretrained flow‑based manipulation policies on ABC‑Sim and Robomimic tasks.

By Chung Min Kim, Brent Yi, David McAllister, Hongsuk Choi, Himanshu Gaurav Singh, Jinkun Cao, Ken Goldberg, Pieter Abbeel, Carmelo Sferrazza, Angjoo Kanazawa
OpenAI Blog
Aug 3, 2017

Gathering human feedback

RL-Teacher is an open-source implementation of our interface to train AIs via occasional human feedback rather than hand-crafted reward functions. The underlying technique was developed as a step towards safe AI systems, but also applies to reinforcement learning problems with rewards that are hard to specify.