arXiv AI

The Three Regimes of Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning

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.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

Do You Really Need to Pretrain Q-Functions for Online RL Fine-Tuning?

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 Machine Learning
Jul 30

Do You Really Need to Pretrain Q-Functions for Online RL Fine-Tuning?

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 Machine Learning
Sep 18

Improving Online Reinforcement Learning via Bidirectional Behavior Prior Distillation

The paper introduces Bidirectional Behavior Prior Distillation (B2PD), a method that uses action‑value priors to train a conditional variational autoencoder for generating high‑value behavior support. These expert behavior priors are then distilled into the online reinforcement learning agent, reducing inefficient exploration and stabilizing policy updates. Experiments on state‑ and pixel‑based tasks show that B2PD improves sample efficiency while maintaining stable learning dynamics.

By Gong Gao, Xiao Lai, Jiaji Shen, Ning Jia, Xianhui Liu, Weidong Zhao