arXiv Machine Learning

Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Diagnosis-Driven Online Reinforcement Learning with Offline Priors

arXiv:2606. 25527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online reinforcement learning (RL) agents increasingly depend on knowledge acquired offline to achieve practical efficiency.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Improving Online Reinforcement Learning via Bidirectional Behavior Prior Distillation

The paper introduces Bidirectional Behavior Prior Distillation (B2PD), a method that uses action‑value priors to train a conditional variational autoencoder for generating high‑value behavior support. These expert behavior priors are then distilled into the online reinforcement learning agent, reducing inefficient exploration and stabilizing policy updates. Experiments on state‑ and pixel‑based tasks show that B2PD improves sample efficiency while maintaining stable learning dynamics.

By Gong Gao, Xiao Lai, Jiaji Shen, Ning Jia, Xianhui Liu, Weidong Zhao
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Reinforcement Learning in the Real World: A Survey of Statistical Challenges and Future Directions

arXiv:2601. 15353v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in real-world decision-making across diverse domains, including gaming, robotics, online advertising, public health, and natural language processing.

By Asim H. Gazi, Yongyi Guo, Daiqi Gao, Ziping Xu, Kelly W. Zhang, Susan A. Murphy
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Not All Prompts Are Equal: Exploration-Guided Prompt Scaffolding for Multimodal Reinforcement Post-Training

The paper introduces an exploration-guided prompt scaffolding framework for multimodal large language models, dynamically adjusting the prompt distribution during reinforcement learning post-training. It uses an Exploration Potential Score (EPS) derived from KL-regularized policy improvement to assess prompt utility without extra overhead, and a teacher model rewrites low-utility prompts to preserve intent while improving informativeness. Experiments on Geo3K, MMK12, MathVision, and MMMU-Pro show consistent performance gains, up to 9.7% in-domain and over 11% on out-of-distribution benchmarks.

By Yuanhao Yue, Qianli Ma, Chengyu Wang, Haoting Wang, Lei Shen, Jun Huang
arXiv AI
Aug 14

Yes, Q-learning Helps Offline In-Context RL

arXiv:2502. 17666v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing offline in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) methods have predominantly relied on supervised training objectives, which are known to have limitations in offline RL settings.

By Denis Tarasov, Alexander Nikulin, Ilya Zisman, Albina Klepach, Andrei Polubarov, Nikita Lyubaykin, Alexander Derevyagin, Igor Kiselev, Vladislav Kurenkov