arXiv:2608.20909v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Offline RL methods commonly jointly train the actor and critic, where the critic is used to guide the actor toward higher-value actions. This coupled l...
By Xuyao Lin, Yixiang Shan, Jinru Duan, Tao Yang, Xinyu Zhao, Runyu Lei, Yiming Zhao, Jiaxin Fan, Zongbao Feng, Peng Jia
The paper introduces LAC (Light Actor, deep Critic), an offline reinforcement learning approach that allocates model capacity to a deep critic rather than a complex actor to improve inference efficiency. It addresses three failure modes—optimization, bootstrap-noise amplification, and value-range drift—using a residual MLP backbone, n‑step bootstrap targets, and a categorical cross‑entropy loss. Experiments on OGBench show LAC matches state‑of‑the‑art diffusion and flow‑matching baselines while reducing inference latency by up to four times.
By Guhyeon Kang, Jaehwi Lee, Minhae Kwon
arXiv:2510. 01460v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a practical paradigm that leverages offline datasets for pretraining and online interactions for fine-tuning.
By Lu Li, Tianwei Ni, Yihao Sun, Pierre-Luc Bacon
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: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
arXiv:2608. 10473v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline-to-online (O2O) reinforcement learning aims to leverage policies pretrained on static datasets while improving them through online interaction.
By Daoyi Li, Yixian Zhang, Chao Yu, Wenbo Ding, Yu Wang
arXiv:2510. 19528v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the fundamental problem of leveraging offline data to accelerate online reinforcement learning - a direction with strong potential but limited theoretical grounding.
By Sebastian Reboul, H\'el\`ene Halconruy
arXiv:2506. 06793v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reward assignment from scarce demonstrations is a key challenge in both offline and online imitation learning.
By Zixuan Dong, Yumi Omori, Keith Ross
arXiv:2505. 22442v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Offline RL (ORL) promises safe and sample-efficient deployment but existing methods rely on undocumented online interactions for hyperparameter tuning and lack reliable fully offline estimates of initial online performance.
By Mattie Fellows, Clarisse Wibault, Uljad Berdica, Johannes Forkel, Maike Osborne, Jakob N. Foerster
arXiv:2609.40149v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Policy regularization in offline reinforcement learning balances policy improvement against reliance on uncertain value estimates. This balance can dif...
By Seonvin Cho, Soohyun Choi, Songnam Hong
arXiv:2603. 05296v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) allows robots to learn from offline datasets without risky exploration.
By Hokyun Im, Andrey Kolobov, Jianlong Fu, Youngwoon Lee
The paper introduces Solver-Gradient Guided Reinforcement Learning (SG‑RL), a method that augments standard RL with bounded gradients from a differentiable MPC solver to adapt cost‑function weights online. SG‑RL integrates solver‑gradient guidance into PPO through actor‑update scaling, policy loss, advantage estimation, and value‑function learning, achieving comparable or superior closed‑loop performance while requiring up to 70.6% fewer samples. Experiments on two autonomous racing platforms with intentional model mismatch demonstrate that SG‑RL outperforms both RL and gradient‑based policy learning baselines and generalizes zero‑shot to unseen environments.
By Baha Zarrouki, Arslan Thobani, Jasper Hoffmann, Mattia Piccinini, Rudolf Reiter, Felix Jahncke, S\'ebastien Gros, Davide Scaramuzza, Johannes Betz