The paper investigates whether enhancing goal representations improves goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) performance. By creating an exact temporal-distance goal representation in deterministic mazes and systematically degrading its geometric quality, the authors find that changes in goal representation have little effect on performance. In contrast, degrading the agent’s current state representation more than doubles failure rates, indicating that state representation is the critical bottleneck. The study further demonstrates that simple random Fourier positional encodings can significantly boost performance on challenging navigation tasks without additional map or objective modifications.
arXiv:2608.29061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) aims to learn policies for reaching diverse goals entirely from fixed trajectory data. Long-hori...
HorizonFlow is a hierarchical planner for offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning that treats the planning horizon as an output rather than a fixed input. It uses a subgoal route planner and an action-prefix controller, both employing insertion-based generation and flow matching, to jointly generate continuous plan content and its length. The method leverages the partially generated plan to guide token insertion and to steer generation toward shorter plans, achieving superior performance on Maze2D, Multi2D, and OGBench benchmarks.
Recent advances in generative planning have made trajectory inpainting a promising approach to offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning. However, these methods typically specify the planning ho...
arXiv:2608. 14332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning is promising for autonomous urban driving, but long-horizon goal-directed navigation asks a policy to acquire several competing behaviors at once--reaching a distant goal, tracking a route, avoiding obstacles, obeying signals--and a fixed objective gives no order in which to learn them.
arXiv:2609.38383v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Random exploration reveals how an environment can be traversed before a goal is specified. Can this experience support long-range planning without po...
arXiv:2607. 13731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning hinges on how the goal is encoded.
The paper introduces DCRL (Divide-and-Conquer RL), a method that recursively decomposes offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning trajectories into a balanced binary tree. By training values from the leaves up to the root, DCRL avoids noisy max-based backups and reduces bootstrap depth from linear to logarithmic, thereby limiting error accumulation. Experiments on diverse goal-reaching tasks show that DCRL outperforms prior flat offline GCRL methods, achieving a higher average score on the most challenging long-horizon OGBench tasks.
arXiv:2609.39915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) requires embodied agents to generate actions based on instructions and observations. General-purpose multimodal agents...
arXiv:2602. 05459v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) is typically benchmarked by the best tuned success rate of each method.
arXiv:2608.22847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) based GUI agents stand to benefit significantly from online reinforcement learning (RL). However, their training is bottl...
arXiv:2601. 22496v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL), hierarchical approaches decompose long-horizon tasks into high-level subgoal prediction and low-level action execution.
The paper introduces Graph-Guided Quasimetric Dense Reward (G2QDR), a framework that learns a state connectivity model to predict pairwise connectivity strengths in asymmetric environments. These strengths are converted into scalar auxiliary dense rewards, offering continuous guidance across hierarchical levels. G2QDR can be integrated into any existing Goal-Conditioned Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning architecture and shows empirical performance improvements in sparse reward settings with modest computational cost.