arXiv AI
Oct 5

EVOL: Simulator-Guided Evolutionary Expert Synthesis for Deployment-Free Learning Path Recommendation

EVOL is a framework that uses a knowledge‑tracing simulator to generate per‑learner expert demonstrations via evolutionary search, and then trains a deployment‑free policy that distills these demonstrations into a feed‑forward learner. The method employs an asymmetric actor‑critic architecture, where the actor plans blindly as in real deployment while the critic has access to privileged simulator state during training. Across three educational datasets and varying path lengths, EVOL outperforms eight baselines and shows that the quality of evolutionary experts, rather than the imitation objective, drives final performance.

By Geonwoo Bang, Dongho Kim, Moohong Min
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Coherent Off-Policy Improvement of Large Behavior Models with Learned Rewards

arXiv:2606. 02194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distilling expert demonstration data into large generative models using behavioral cloning is a scalable approach to learning capable policies for robotic control, particularly for dexterous manipulation.

By Christian Scherer, Joe Watson, Theo Gruner, Daniel Palenicek, Ingmar Posner, Jan Peters
arXiv AI
Jun 2

ExpertGen: Scalable Sim-to-Real Expert Policy Learning from Imperfect Behavior Priors

arXiv:2603. 15956v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning generalizable and robust behavior cloning policies requires large volumes of high-quality robotics data.

By Zifan Xu, Ran Gong, Maria Vittoria Minniti, Kausik Sivakumar, Ahmet Salih Gundogdu, Eric Rosen, Riedana Yan, Tushar Kusnur, Zixing Wang, Di Deng, Peter Stone, Xiaohan Zhang, Karl Schmeckpeper
arXiv AI
Aug 13

TMRL: Diffusion Timestep-Modulated Pretraining Enables Exploration for Efficient Policy Finetuning

arXiv:2605. 12236v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning pre-trained robot policies with reinforcement learning (RL) often inherits the bottlenecks introduced by pre-training with behavioral cloning (BC), which produces narrow action distributions that lack the coverage necessary for downstream exploration.

By Matthew M. Hong, Jesse Zhang, Anusha Nagabandi, Abhishek Gupta