arXiv Machine Learning

From Pixels to Temporal Correlations: Learning Informative Representations for Reinforcement Learning Pre-training

arXiv:2607. 00811v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unsupervised pre-training on large-scale datasets has demonstrated significant potential for improving the sample efficiency and performance of Reinforcement Learning (RL).

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Rollout Total Correlation for Deep Reinforcement Learning

The paper proposes a method for learning task-relevant representations in deep reinforcement learning by maximizing rollout total correlation, which captures the correlation among all learned representations and actions across entire trajectories. It introduces two complementary lower bounds—one generative and one discriminative—along with chunk‑wise mini‑batching to improve this objective, and also proposes an intrinsic reward derived from the learned representation to enhance exploration. Experiments on challenging image‑based simulated control tasks demonstrate improved sample efficiency and robustness to white noise and natural video backgrounds compared to leading baselines.

By Bang You, Huaping Liu, Jan Peters, Oleg Arenz
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 10

VideoTIR: Accurate Understanding for Long Videos with Efficient Tool-Integrated Reasoning

VideoTIR introduces a reinforcement‑learning approach to improve long‑video understanding by encouraging multimodal large language models to use comprehensive multi‑level toolkits efficiently. It combines Zero‑RL and SFT cold‑starting strategies to help models retrieve and focus on meaningful video segments, images, and regions, thereby reducing hallucinations. The method includes Toolkit Action Grouped Policy Optimization (TAGPO) to streamline tool‑calling and a sandbox‑based trajectory synthesis framework for high‑quality data, achieving strong results on three long‑video QA benchmarks.

By Zhe Gao, Shiyu Shen, Taifeng Chai, Weinong Wang, Haotian Xu, Xing Wu, Wenbin Li, Qi Fan, Yang Gao, Dacheng Tao
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Persistent Robot World Models: Stabilizing Multi-Step Rollouts via Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces a reinforcement learning post‑training scheme that trains robot world models on their own autoregressive rollouts, using a contrastive RL objective adapted from diffusion models. It also proposes a training protocol that compares multiple variable‑length futures, a multi‑view visual fidelity reward, and demonstrates state‑of‑the‑art rollout fidelity on the DROID dataset, outperforming baselines on LPIPS, SSIM, and human preference tests.

By Jai Bardhan, Patrik Drozdik, Josef Sivic, Vladimir Petrik
arXiv AI
Jun 12

ReFoCUS: Reinforcement-guided Frame Optimization for Contextual Understanding

arXiv:2506. 01274v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent progress in Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) has enabled effective vision-language reasoning, yet the ability to video understanding remains constrained by suboptimal frame selection strategies, albeit with the rapid development of video-specialized LMMs.

By Hosu Lee, Junho Kim, Hyunjun Kim, Yong Man Ro