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.
By Hyeonseong Jeon, Youngwoon Lee
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.
By JunHyeok Oh, Zian Jang, Byung-Jun Lee
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:2608.29061v1 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...
By Soohyun Choi, Seonvin Cho, Songnam Hong
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.
By Shuyuan Zhang, Zihan Wang, Xiao-Wen Chang, Doina Precup
Grounded Transitive RL (GTRL) is an offline goal‑conditioned reinforcement learning algorithm that improves upon divide‑and‑conquer value learning by grounding updates with a one‑step temporal‑difference (TD) target. By adding this TD target rather than replacing it, GTRL ensures every state‑goal pair receives an update and corrects bias from hindsight relabeling through reweighting based on reachability. The method was evaluated on nineteen OGBench tasks across stochastic, deterministic, and stitching environments, achieving the highest average success rate among compared approaches.
By Abdul Monaf Chowdhury, MD Sameer Iqbal Chowdhury, Shifat E Arman, Md Mehedi Hasan
arXiv:2607. 15610v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key approach for training LLM agents, yet popular methods such as GRPO/RLOO rely on multiple independently sampled complete trajectories for advantage estimation.
By Xintong Li, Sha Li, Yuwei Zhang, Changlong Yu, Rongmei Lin, Hongye Jin, Shuyi Guan, Xin Liu, Linwei Li, Qingyu Yin, Jingbo Shang
The paper introduces Planning Under Noise (PUN), a neural operator that learns noise‑aware value fields for planning in unseen geometries. By imposing reflecting Neumann conditions on obstacles and a Dirichlet condition at the goal, PUN allows sampled paths to explore free space until reaching the target. It extends the Monte Carlo solver Walk on Stars to higher dimensions, learns geometry‑to‑field mappings from noisy labels, and achieves high success rates and low runtimes on 4‑D replanning benchmarks across multiple noise levels.
By Michael Chen, Hong Chul Nam, Xi Deng, Anima Anandkumar
arXiv:2609.34575v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) learns goal-directed policies from reward-free data, but in long-horizon tasks, goal-conditi...
By Hengrui Zhang, Yuhu Cheng, C. L. Philip Chen, Xuesong Wang
arXiv:2607. 20834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) holds the promise of learning general-purpose policies from static datasets.
By Ahad Jawaid
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.
By Syed Nazmus Sakib, Abdul Monaf Chowdhury, Nafiul Haque, Shifat E Arman, Md Mehedi Hasan
Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) holds the promise of learning general-purpose policies from static datasets. However, scaling these methods to long-horizon tasks remains a challenge due to the curse of horizon, where value estimation errors can compound through long chains of bootstrapped Bellman backups.