arXiv:2606. 08513v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) traditionally rely on complex, heavily engineered pipelines for perception, path planning, and motion control.
arXiv:2608. 02034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-step returns accelerate reward propagation in off-policy reinforcement learning, but couple the evaluation of each decision to the suboptimal logged actions that follow it, inducing a pessimistic bias that grows with the horizon.
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.
arXiv:2511. 06229v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper focuses on dynamic origin-destination matrix estimation (DODE), a crucial calibration process necessary for the effective application of microscopic traffic simulations.
arXiv:2607. 24057v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-world Reinforcement Learning depends on the ability to formulate safety constraints into a policy.
arXiv:2607. 08925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training reinforcement-learning agents directly on physical robots makes every fall costly, since a fall can damage the platform and cannot be undone like a simulator reset; the goal is therefore to minimize falls during training rather than trade them off against return, as constrained Markov decision process (MDP) formulations do.
arXiv:2606. 08602v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an online reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for fine-tuning flow-matching policies in continuous-control problems.
arXiv:2607. 08340v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Q-learning is a fundamental algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL) for solving discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) when the transition kernel is unknown.
The paper introduces BUMEX, a reinforcement learning exploration strategy that leverages a set of prior models containing the true transition kernel and reward function. By optimizing over this model set, the method derives upper and lower bounds on the Q‑function to guide exploration, providing theoretical guarantees of convergence to the optimal policy. When the model set follows a bounded‑parameter MDP structure, the optimization becomes convex, enabling finite‑time convergence under mild assumptions and demonstrating accelerated learning in simulations.
arXiv:2608. 12912v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper considers the overestimation bias problem of Q-learning in the setting of a large action space, for the purpose of relieving the bottleneck of existing methods.
arXiv:2606. 04845v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sequential decision-making problems are often modelled as a Markov decision process (MDP).
The paper introduces state abstractions that preserve the difference of Q‑functions for offline reinforcement learning, aiming to exclude irrelevant dynamics from rich state data. It proposes a dynamic generalization of the R‑learner that uses orthogonal estimation and sparse learning to estimate the Q‑function contrast, achieving faster convergence and consistency under a margin condition. Experiments on simulated and simulator‑augmented real data show variance reductions and demonstrate that the necessary information for sequential decision‑making can be smaller than that required for full state prediction.