arXiv Machine Learning

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

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
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 Machine Learning
Aug 28

Arrive and Survive: Scaling Safe Goal-Conditioned Policy Learning from One-Bit Failure Signals

The paper introduces Safe Contrastive Reinforcement Learning (Safe-CRL), a method that corrects bias in contrastive RL caused by failure-terminated Markov decision processes. By applying mass-weighted InfoNCE and a log-survival-mass score, Safe-CRL uses only a one-bit failure signal to improve survival and goal-reaching performance across twelve robot navigation and locomotion tasks. The approach demonstrates complex failure-avoidance behaviors and completes the theoretical foundation of contrastive RL under failure termination.

By Guopeng Li, Yiyang Duan, Yiru Jiao, Chengcheng Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Toward Plasticity-Preserving KL Regularization for Capability Retention in LLM Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2608. 01743v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central paradigm for large language model (LLM) post-training, but optimization toward new objectives can degrade capabilities already present in the base model.

By Li Wang, Xiaodong Lu, Xiaohan Wang, Jiajun Chai, Wei Lin, Tianhao Peng, Guojun Yin