arXiv:2605.06149v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: The discount factor in reinforcement learning controls both the effective planning horizon and the strength of bootstrapping, yet most deep R...
By Yaomin Wang, Jianting Pan, Ran Tian, Xiaoyang Li, Yu Zhang, Hengle Qin, Tianshu YU
arXiv:2410.14606v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Learning from a stream of experience as it arrives, also known as streaming learning, is a core part of natural learning. However, reliable streami...
By Mohamed Elsayed, Elena Sorina Lupu, Gautham Vasan, A. Rupam Mahmood
arXiv:2602. 12643v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Unified Latent Dynamics (ULD), a novel reinforcement learning algorithm that unifies the efficiency of model-free methods with the representational strengths of model-based approaches, without incurring planning overhead.
By Jashaswimalya Acharjee, Balaraman Ravindran
arXiv:2606. 29806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Action-values are foundational to many control algorithms such as Q-learning.
By Prabhat Nagarajan, Brett Daley, Martha White, Marlos C. Machado
arXiv:2605. 05481v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit a classic "chicken-and-egg" problem in reinforcement learning: to safely improve a policy, the value function must be accurate on the state-visitation distribution of the updated policy.
By Dillon Sandhu, Ronald Parr
arXiv:2602. 10430v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Off-policy policy optimization reuses historical behavior, including negative-advantage samples that suppress known failures.
By Yusen Huo, Changping Wang, Yangru Huang, Jun Zhang, Jie Jiang
arXiv:2503. 03660v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a sequence-conditioned critic for Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) that models trajectory context with a lightweight Transformer and trains on aggregated $N$-step targets.
By Dong Tian, Onur Celik, Gerhard Neumann
arXiv:2608.20909v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Offline RL methods commonly jointly train the actor and critic, where the critic is used to guide the actor toward higher-value actions. This coupled l...
By Xuyao Lin, Yixiang Shan, Jinru Duan, Tao Yang, Xinyu Zhao, Runyu Lei, Yiming Zhao, Jiaxin Fan, Zongbao Feng, Peng Jia
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.
By John L. Zhou, Yuxuan Dong, Jonathan C. Kao
arXiv:2609.06421v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Batch normalization (BN) substantially improves sample efficiency in continuous-control actor-critic methods such as CrossQ, yet recent studies repor...
By Daniel Palenicek, Mikael Henaff, Scott Fujimoto, Koustuv Sinha
The paper introduces Cross-Behavior Policy Optimization (CBPO), a method that unifies offline demonstrations and policy-generated rollouts into a single regression loss using a fixed-reference target. CBPO eliminates the need for separate supervised fine‑tuning and reinforcement learning objectives, allowing positive and negative offline completions, reference responses, and current and historical rollouts to share a common reward‑labeled format and replay buffer. Experiments on two model scales and four mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that CBPO, especially the CBPO‑Unified variant, outperforms baseline methods in avg@32 and pass@32 metrics, with historical rollouts providing additional gains.
By Du Cheng, Junyu Lu, Jingfan Zhang, Yuzhuo Zhang, Haoxuan Jia, Shichao Weng
The paper introduces Space-sampled Value Decay (SsVD), a forgetting mechanism designed for non-stationary reinforcement learning where the environment can drift at every timestep. SsVD selectively pulls value estimates of randomly chosen state-space elements toward a baseline, discarding outdated information without requiring reset or change-point detection. Integrated into Soft Actor Critic and Deep Q-Networks, SsVD outperforms its base algorithms across six non-stationary environments and can also promote optimism in hard-exploration tasks.
By Felix St\"orck, Philipp Hartmann, Fabian Hinder, Klaus Neumann, Barbara Hammer