The paper unifies goal‑conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) and mutual information skill learning (MISL) under a control‑maximization framework. It shows that three canonical GCRL formulations are fundamentally inequivalent, yet all can be interpreted as maximizing goal sensitivity of future trajectories. By relating MISL objectives to these GCRL formulations, the authors prove that each MISL objective is bounded by a formulation‑specific downstream goal sensitivity, establishing a precise correspondence between skill diversity and goal‑reachability.
arXiv:2602. 05459v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) is typically benchmarked by the best tuned success rate of each method.
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.
arXiv:2509. 03206v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning from reward functions and imitation learning of demonstrations are the two principal approaches for training autonomous systems that interact with an environment through action and observation.
arXiv:2608.30406v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning struggles with long horizons when rewards are sparse. While a planner can provide subgoals to guide a low-level...
arXiv:2601. 19810v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised pre-training can equip reinforcement learning agents with prior knowledge and accelerate learning in downstream tasks.
arXiv:2608. 03223v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning enables LLM agents to learn through interaction, but sparse trajectory-level rewards reveal success without identifying which intermediate decisions deserve credit.
arXiv:2609. 03241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A reasoning model can improve from its own on-policy experience, but this inner loop is fragile: terminal verifiers provide reliable yet sparse supervision, while dense same-model guidance can reinforce false confidence or overconcentrate learning on a narrow solution mode.
The paper introduces RADT, a decision transformer for offline, reward‑free, goal‑conditioned reinforcement learning that can handle arbitrary avoid‑regions specified at evaluation time. By encoding goals and avoid‑regions as prompt tokens and using an avoid‑region hindsight relabeling strategy, RADT learns reach‑avoid behavior from suboptimal random trajectories without reward or cost supervision. Across 17 tasks and environments, RADT outperforms existing offline goal‑conditioned RL models, achieving significant zero‑shot generalization to novel avoid‑region sizes and counts, and is also applied to a biological cell reprogramming task.
arXiv:2610.35059v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can produce plausible but incorrect answers when they are uncertain, which can mislead users and undermine model reliabi...
arXiv:2510. 17059v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Zero-shot imitation learning requires an agent to reproduce expert behavior from a single demonstration without additional environment interaction or gradient updates at test time.
AUSO (Action-level Unified Skill Optimization) is a method that unifies skill learning and skill use through a progressive, action-aware optimization process. It starts by jointly learning from teacher guidance and environmental outcomes, then shifts to outcome-based policy optimization, and finally evaluates each action under skill-conditioned and skill-free contexts to strengthen beneficial skill-sensitive actions while suppressing harmful ones. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and SearchQA demonstrate that AUSO consistently improves agent performance and out-of-distribution generalization compared to competitive baselines.
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.