The paper introduces Bidirectional Voronoi-biased Exploration Curriculum (BVER), a method that expands start states from the goal and goals from the initial state simultaneously, guiding both toward each other to train a single goal-conditioned policy. Inspired by bidirectional RRT planning, BVER biases exploration toward unexplored task space and steers the two expansions together. Experiments on point-mass mazes, quadrupedal box climbing, and robot-arm ring-on-peg transfer show that BVER learns faster than other reference-free curricula, achieving high success rates and robustness without requiring demonstrations.
By Juri Pfammatter, Kaixian Qu, Clemens Schwarke, Victor Klemm, Marco Hutter
arXiv:2607. 18296v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Baghchal is a two-player asymmetric board game with Nepali origins where four tigers are to capture goats and twenty goats desire to keep tigers in immobility.
By Ranjit Raut, Aarav Subedi, Sagun Rai, Aaryan Shakya, Manoj Shakya
arXiv:2610.13995v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Post-training large language models (LLMs) on two-player zero-sum games provides a verifiable reward, and the gains have been shown to transfer to ge...
By Weixian Waylon Li, Jiaxin Zhang, Han Zhou, Chengzu Li, Ke Wang, Fengxiang He, Yiwen Guo
arXiv:2611.07130v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement learning has achieved strong performance in many tasks by letting agents learn from nothing more than a reward signal. However, in more c...
By Shan Yang
PhantomEnvironments is a framework that trains large language model agents in synthetic, rule‑generated fictional worlds. By creating multi‑turn reinforcement learning environments where agents search templated articles to answer multi‑hop questions, the approach eliminates the need for costly human data or hallucinated LLM‑generated settings. Agents trained in these zero‑cost, purely rule‑based worlds transfer effectively to real‑world multi‑hop search benchmarks, often surpassing models trained on real data, and demonstrate scalable search behavior that grows linearly with question difficulty.
By Anmol Kabra, Swathi Saravana Selvam, Albert Gong, Chao Wan, Christian Belardi, Dongyoung Go, Katie Z. Luo, Kilian Q. Weinberger
The paper introduces LUGL (Local Updates, Global Learning), a framework that separates data collection from model fitting, allowing non‑incremental learners such as gradient‑boosted trees (LightGBM) to be used in reinforcement learning for games. LUGL alternates between a local update phase—where agents play self‑play games and store tabular updates—and a global learning phase—where a function approximator is trained on the accumulated table before it is reset. Experiments on both perfect‑information and imperfect‑information games show that LightGBM‑based agents perform competitively or better than neural‑network baselines like DQN and DeepCFR.
By David Milec, Spyridon Samothrakis, Michael Fairbank, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers