arXiv AI

Topology-Guided Modular Actor-Critic Learning for Continuous Systems under Temporal Objectives

arXiv AI
Aug 14

Exploiting Symbolic Heuristics for the Synthesis of Domain-Specific Temporal Planning Guidance using Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2505. 13372v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work investigated the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) for the synthesis of heuristic guidance to improve the performance of temporal planners when a domain is fixed and a set of training problems (not plans) is given.

By Irene Brugnara, Alessandro Valentini, Andrea Micheli
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

Latent Spherical Flow Policy for Reinforcement Learning with Combinatorial Actions

arXiv:2601. 22211v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) with combinatorial action spaces remains challenging because feasible action sets are exponentially large and governed by complex feasibility constraints, making direct policy parameterization impractical.

By Lingkai Kong, Anagha Satish, Hezi Jiang, Akseli Kangaslahti, Andrew Ma, Wenbo Chen, Mingxiao Song, Lily Xu, Milind Tambe
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Q-Shaped Options for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces Q-Shaped Options (QSO), a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that learns action abstractions between consecutive levels using shared encoders shaped by Q functions. QSO employs distinct state-value functions, Q functions, and policies at each hierarchy level, encouraging the low-level Q function to preserve distinctions needed for optimal control while the high-level Q function discards unnecessary distinctions. Experiments on offline goal-conditioned locomotion and manipulation tasks show that QSO learns semantically meaningful option spaces and outperforms baselines, achieving non-zero performance where other algorithms fail.

By Clarisse Wibault, Antoine Gorceix, Antonio L\'eon Villares, Alexey Zakharov, Evangelos Chatzaroulas, Michael Matthews, Eduardo Pignatelli, Jakob Foerster
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Higher-Order Action Supervision Makes A Strong Policy Class

The paper proposes a new loss scheme that simultaneously supervises zeroth- and first-order actions to improve policy performance and control robustness in data-driven decision-making methods such as imitation learning and reinforcement learning. The approach provides formal theoretical guarantees, works with any off-the-shelf policy model, and can be added as a lightweight plug‑and‑play module to existing offline RL frameworks. Experiments on OGBench and D4RL show significant gains in performance, robustness, and out‑of‑distribution generalization, especially in low‑data settings.

By Peng Cheng, Yunxian Hou, Zhi Zhou, Qian Zhang, Chang Huang, Xianyuan Zhan