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: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
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:2607. 11720v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Background: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables effective policies to be trained from large, previously collected datasets and subsequently improved through limited online interaction.
By Alper Kamil Bozkurt, Shangtong Zhang, Yuichi Motai
Background: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables effective policies to be trained from large, previously collected datasets and subsequently improved through limited online interaction. This offline-to-online RL (O2O-RL) paradigm is particularly promising in nonstationary domains where interaction is costly or potentially hazardous.
arXiv:2502. 19544v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Leveraging offline data is a promising way to improve the sample efficiency of online reinforcement learning (RL).
By Yi Zhao, Aidan Scannell, Wenshuai Zhao, Yuxin Hou, Tianyu Cui, Le Chen, Dieter B\"uchler, Arno Solin, Juho Kannala, Joni Pajarinen
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:2602. 17632v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods find performant actor-critics, however, fine-tuning these actor-critics online with value-based RL algorithms typically causes immediate drops in performance.
By Nathan Samuel de Lara, Florian Shkurti
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
arXiv:2607. 19399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: It is commonly observed that online reinforcement learning (RL) produces better-performing strategies than offline methods across a broad range of performance measures.
By Dmitriy Poyarkov, Aleksei Staroverov, Aleksandr I. Panov
arXiv:2606. 15333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM unlearning has emerged as a cost-effective alternative to full retraining for removing hazardous knowledge from pretrained models while preserving general utility.
By Zirui Pang, Chenlong Zhang, Haosheng Tan, Zhuoran Jin, Jiaheng Wei, Zixin Zhong