In reinforcement learning policy evaluation, classic on-policy methods often suffer from high variance when estimating policy performance. To mitigate this issue, behavior policy search has been propo...
arXiv:2603. 09344v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables data-efficient and safe policy learning without online exploration, but its performance often degrades under distribution shift.
By Hongqiang Lin, Zhenghui Fu, Weihao Tang, Pengfei Wang, Yiding Sun, Qixian Huang, Dongxu Zhang
arXiv:2602. 05379v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Effective reinforcement learning (RL) for complex stochastic systems requires leveraging historical data to improve sample efficiency and accelerate policy optimization.
By Hua Zheng, Wei Xie, M. Ben Feng, Keilung Choy
arXiv:2605. 29032v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) agents typically learn world models by minimizing predictive loss.
By Christoph Dann, Yishay Mansour, Mehryar Mohri
arXiv:2601. 19612v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe exploration is a key requirement for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn and adapt online, beyond controlled (e.
By Manuel Wendl, Yarden As, Manish Prajapat, Anton Pollak, Stelian Coros, Andreas Krause
arXiv:2607. 26509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms for continuous control typically rely on neural value function approximation to guide policy improvement.
By Gong Gao, Xiao Lai, Ziqi Xie, Guojie Chen, Xianhui Liu, Weidong Zhao
arXiv:2505.01361v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Temporal difference (TD) learning is a foundational algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). For nearly forty years, TD learning has served as a w...
By Hwanwoo Kim, Panos Toulis, Eric Laber
arXiv:2510. 03494v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study finite-horizon offline reinforcement learning (RL) with function approximation for both policy evaluation and policy optimization.
By Volodymyr Tkachuk, Csaba Szepesv\'ari, Xiaoqi Tan
arXiv:2605. 05481v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit a classic "chicken-and-egg" problem in reinforcement learning: to safely improve a policy, the value function must be accurate on the state-visitation distribution of the updated policy.
By Dillon Sandhu, Ronald Parr
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
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
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