The paper introduces Selective Supervision for Direct-OPD (S$^2$D-OPD), a refinement of Direct On-Policy Distillation that filters out states where the teacher’s policy change is minimal, as measured by the teacher‑reference Jensen‑Shannon divergence. By masking low‑divergence states and keeping only the top 10% of states per response, S$^2$D-OPD improves held‑out accuracy on AIME and HMMT benchmarks across multiple teacher‑student pairs without additional forward passes.
By Yibo Zhao, Zixuan Yang, Yunshi Lan, Xiang Li
The paper investigates the problem of sharing a single critic across multiple parallel environments in reinforcement learning. It shows that when environments assign different expected returns to the same state, a shared critic must reconcile conflicting value targets, which can distort advantage estimates and misguide policy updates. The authors propose a simple fix—providing the critic with the environment index—demonstrating through bandit models and experiments on CartPole, MuJoCo, BipedalWalker, and 16 Procgen games that this conditional critic stabilizes learning and boosts returns, achieving a 40.8% improvement in aggregate normalized return on unseen levels.
By Zhenya Liu, Yang Meng, Zhuokai Zhao, Xuefeng Liu, Yuxin Chen
arXiv:2608. 19587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While entropy regularization is widely used to stabilize and accelerate Natural Policy Gradient methods, its ability to yield faster convergence rates for the unregularized objective remains underexplored.
By Zhiqiang Tan
The paper presents a convergence framework for deep $V$‑learning over a finite horizon $H$, deriving explicit bounds on policy loss by decomposing the Bellman update error into six residuals. It shows how $L^s$ concentrability controls expected $L^1$ loss, quantifies the impact of shared sampling across horizon levels, and provides optimal and near‑optimal sample allocations for statistical error rates. The work also establishes sharp action‑gap bounds under a margin condition, transfers optimal‑gap results to frozen‑iterate gaps, and offers consistency guarantees for generative‑reset approximate‑ERM procedures with exact action scores.
By Yury Kolomeytsev
arXiv:2606. 16515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman theory implies that the optimal goal-conditioned action depends on the goal only through the gradient of the goal-reaching distance at the current state, yet standard online GCRL still conditions the actor on the raw goal -- a signal that is geometrically uninformative when the goal is far from the data distribution.
By Swaminathan S K, Damiya Gondha, Theyanesh Eswaramoorthy Rajahkrishnan, Aritra Hazra
arXiv:2608. 02034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-step returns accelerate reward propagation in off-policy reinforcement learning, but couple the evaluation of each decision to the suboptimal logged actions that follow it, inducing a pessimistic bias that grows with the horizon.
By Abdelghani Ghanem, Mounir Ghogho