arXiv Machine Learning

Locally-Guided Actor-Critic: Training a Goal-conditioned Actor with a Subgoal-aware Critic

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

An Informational Curse of Horizon in Goal-Conditioned Policy Learning

The paper identifies an informational curse of horizon in goal-conditioned policy learning, showing that longer goal relabeling horizons during training can hurt policy generalization and performance. Controlled experiments with oracle planners separate training horizons from test horizons, revealing that behavioral cloning policies degrade with longer horizons while reinforcement learning mitigates this effect. The authors attribute this to reduced conditional mutual information between actions and hindsight-relabeled goals, and demonstrate that distilling short-horizon policy Jacobians into long-horizon policies improves performance, especially in combinatorial manipulation tasks.

By John L. Zhou, Yuxuan Dong, Jonathan C. Kao
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Beyond a single latent space: a dual-latent world model for long-horizon planning

The paper introduces the Dual-Latent World Model (Dual-WM), which separates local execution and long-range planning into distinct latent spaces and dynamics models. A new learning method, Long-Horizon Representation Learning with Weighted Rollout (LoRe), supervises predictions at both levels using exponential horizon weights. Experiments on five goal-conditioned visual control tasks show that Dual-WM improves success rates over strong baselines, especially at longer horizons.

By Delin Zhao, Zhengrong Yue, Shaobin Zhuang, Junlin He, Xiaoyu Chen, Zikang Wang, Yuxin Liu, Limin Wang, Yali Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Improving Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning via Selective Reward Stimulation

The paper introduces Reward Stimulation Implicit Q-Learning (RSIQL), a non-hierarchical approach to improve offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning. RSIQL adds auxiliary reward signals at intermediate states that are predicted to aid progress toward the goal, thereby reducing the delay in training supervision. Experiments on D4RL goal-reaching benchmarks and OGBench demonstrate that RSIQL outperforms baseline goal-conditioned IQL and rivals hierarchical offline methods while maintaining a simple flat policy structure.

By Jing Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 8

Uncertainty-Aware LLM-Guided Policy Shaping for Sparse-Reward Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 06673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse rewards and heterogeneous task sequences remain persistent challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL), often resulting in slow convergence, weak generalization, and inefficient exploration.

By Ujjwal Bhatta, Utsabi Dangol, Sumaly Bajracharya, Rodrigue Rizk, KC Santosh
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 7

Generalizable Dense Reward for Long-Horizon Robotic Tasks

arXiv:2604.00055v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing robotic foundation policies are trained primarily via large-scale imitation learning. While such models demonstrate strong capabilit...

By Silong Yong, Stephen Sheng, Carl Qi, Xiaojie Wang, Evan Sheehan, Anurag Shivaprasad, Yaqi Xie, Katia Sycara, Yesh Dattatreya
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Coherent Off-Policy Improvement of Large Behavior Models with Learned Rewards

arXiv:2606. 02194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distilling expert demonstration data into large generative models using behavioral cloning is a scalable approach to learning capable policies for robotic control, particularly for dexterous manipulation.

By Christian Scherer, Joe Watson, Theo Gruner, Daniel Palenicek, Ingmar Posner, Jan Peters
arXiv AI
Oct 7

Rationale-Guided Policy Optimization: Learning to Reason with Adaptive Rationale Scaffolding

Rationale-Guided Policy Optimization (RGPO) is a reinforcement‑learning framework that adaptively uses ground‑truth rationale information to scaffold a language model’s reasoning process. Instead of treating reference solutions as fixed imitation targets, RGPO temporarily incorporates rationales to help the model generate better responses, then reverts to unguided learning with higher‑reward, model‑generated solutions. Experiments in both language‑only and vision‑language tasks show that RGPO consistently outperforms RLVR baselines, with ablation studies confirming that adaptive rationale guidance is a key factor in its success.

By Hoang Phan, Minh Pham, Chau Pham, Chinmay Hegde, Trung Le, Qi Lei