Value functions are an essential component in actor-critic based deep reinforcement learning (RL). Conventionally, these functions are trained as a regression task by minimising the mean squared error (MSE) relative to bootstrapped target values.
arXiv:2607. 26509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms for continuous control typically rely on neural value function approximation to guide policy improvement.
By Gong Gao, Xiao Lai, Ziqi Xie, Guojie Chen, Xianhui Liu, Weidong Zhao
arXiv:2608. 02181v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) for large language models typically trains its critic by mean-squared-error (MSE) regression on scalar value targets.
By Zhijian Zhou, Long Li, Xuan Zhang, Zongkai Liu, Yulei Qin, Ke Li, Xing Sun, Xiaoyu Tan, Chao Qu, Yuan Qi
arXiv:2601. 23075v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a dominant paradigm for continuous control, yet standard implementations rely on Gaussian actors and relatively shallow MLP policies, often leading to brittle optimization when gradients are noisy, and policy updates must be conservative.
By Yuexin Bian, Jie Feng, Tao Wang, Yijiang Li, Sicun Gao, Yuanyuan Shi
arXiv:2607. 21302v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavior prior reinforcement learning (BPRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm to improve sample efficiency in online reinforcement learning (RL) by leveraging policy priors derived from offline demonstrations.
By Gong Gao, Weidong Zhao, Xianhui Liu, Ning Jia
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