English

Self-Improving Skill Learning for Robust Skill-based Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2026-05-21 v5 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) facilitates rapid adaptation to unseen tasks but faces challenges in long-horizon environments. Skill-based approaches tackle this by decomposing state-action sequences into reusable skills and employing hierarchical decision-making. However, these methods are highly susceptible to noisy offline demonstrations, leading to unstable skill learning and degraded performance. To address this, we propose Self-Improving Skill Learning (SISL), which performs self-guided skill refinement using decoupled high-level and skill improvement policies, while applying skill prioritization via maximum return relabeling to focus updates on task-relevant trajectories, resulting in robust and stable adaptation even under noisy and suboptimal data. By mitigating the effect of noise, SISL achieves reliable skill learning and consistently outperforms other skill-based meta-RL methods on diverse long-horizon tasks. Our code is available at https://epsilog.github.io/SISL.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.03752,
  title  = {Self-Improving Skill Learning for Robust Skill-based Meta-Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Sanghyeon Lee and Sangjun Bae and Yisak Park and Seungyul Han},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.03752},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

10 pages main, 27 pages appendix with reference. Accepted to ICLR 2026

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:34:19.238Z