arXiv AI
Oct 1

Do Better Goal Representations Improve Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning?

The paper investigates whether enhancing goal representations improves goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) performance. By creating an exact temporal-distance goal representation in deterministic mazes and systematically degrading its geometric quality, the authors find that changes in goal representation have little effect on performance. In contrast, degrading the agent’s current state representation more than doubles failure rates, indicating that state representation is the critical bottleneck. The study further demonstrates that simple random Fourier positional encodings can significantly boost performance on challenging navigation tasks without additional map or objective modifications.

By Syed Nazmus Sakib, Abdul Monaf Chowdhury, Nafiul Haque, Shifat E Arman, Md Mehedi Hasan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Survival Reinforcement Learning: Toward Scalable Self-Supervised RL

The paper introduces Survival Reinforcement Learning (SRL), an online classification-based method that extends the survival value learning framework to maximize an agent’s dwell time at target goals. SRL addresses limitations of contrastive reinforcement learning (CRL) in long-horizon, goal-conditioned tasks by avoiding the uniformity-tolerance dilemma and reducing undesirable bang-bang control behaviors. Across robotic benchmarks, SRL matches CRL on manipulation tasks and outperforms it by 2x to 8x on stable, long-horizon locomotion tasks, suggesting classification-based approaches are a promising direction for scaling reinforcement learning.

By Franki Nguimatsia-Tiofack, Fabian Schramm, Th\'eotime Le Hellard, Justin Carpentier