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Related papers: Flattening Hierarchies with Policy Bootstrapping

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Offline reinforcement learning (RL) tries to learn the near-optimal policy with recorded offline experience without online exploration. Current offline RL research includes: 1) generative modeling, i.e., approximating a policy using fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Hua Wei , Deheng Ye , Zhao Liu , Hao Wu , Bo Yuan , Qiang Fu , Wei Yang , Zhenhui Li

We introduce an offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that explicitly clones a behavior policy to constrain value learning. In offline RL, it is often important to prevent a policy from selecting unobserved actions, since the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Wonjoon Goo , Scott Niekum

This paper studies offline, zero-shot planning under Signal Temporal Logic (STL) specifications. We assume access only to an offline dataset of state-action-state transitions collected by a task-agnostic behavior policy, with no analytical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Ancheng Hou , Ruijia Liu , Xiang Yin

Hierarchical decomposition of control is unavoidable in large dynamical systems. In reinforcement learning (RL), it is usually solved with subgoals defined at higher policy levels and achieved at lower policy levels. Reaching these goals…

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) suffers from exploration inefficiency, where models struggle to generate successful rollouts, resulting in minimal learning signal. This challenge is particularly severe for tasks that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Saaket Agashe , Jayanth Srinivasa , Gaowen Liu , Ramana Kompella , Xin Eric Wang

We consider the problem of learning useful robotic skills from previously collected offline data without access to manually specified rewards or additional online exploration, a setting that is becoming increasingly important for scaling…

Real-world decision-making tasks typically occur in complex and open environments, posing significant challenges to reinforcement learning (RL) agents' exploration efficiency and long-horizon planning capabilities. A promising approach is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Yajie Qi , Wei Wei , Lin Li , Lijun Zhang , Zhidong Gao , Da Wang , Huizhong Song

Reinforcement learning (RL) is central to improving reasoning in large language models (LLMs) but typically requires ground-truth rewards. Test-Time Reinforcement Learning (TTRL) removes this need by using majority-vote rewards, but relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Aleksei Arzhantsev , Otmane Sakhi , Flavian Vasile

Traditionally, reinforcement learning methods predict the next action based on the current state. However, in many situations, directly applying actions to control systems or robots is dangerous and may lead to unexpected behaviors because…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Nan Lin , Yuxuan Li , Yujun Zhu , Ruolin Wang , Xiayu Zhang , Jianmin Ji , Keke Tang , Xiaoping Chen , Xinming Zhang

Curiosity has established itself as a powerful exploration strategy in deep reinforcement learning. Notably, leveraging expected future novelty as intrinsic motivation has been shown to efficiently generate exploratory trajectories, as well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Marco Bagatella , Georg Martius

Diffusion and flow matching policies offer expressive, multimodal action modeling, yet they are frequently unstable in online reinforcement learning (RL) due to intractable likelihoods and gradients propagating through long sampling chains.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Chubin Zhang , Zhenglin Wan , Feng Chen , Fuchao Yang , Lang Feng , Yaxin Zhou , Xingrui Yu , Yang You , Ivor Tsang , Bo An

We provide a framework for accelerating reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by heuristics constructed from domain knowledge or offline data. Tabula rasa RL algorithms require environment interactions or computation that scales with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Ching-An Cheng , Andrey Kolobov , Adith Swaminathan

Although well-established in general reinforcement learning (RL), value-based methods are rarely explored in constrained RL (CRL) for their incapability of finding policies that can randomize among multiple actions. To apply value-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Tianchi Cai , Wenpeng Zhang , Lihong Gu , Xiaodong Zeng , Jinjie Gu

Hierarchical reinforcement learning is a promising approach to tackle long-horizon decision-making problems with sparse rewards. Unfortunately, most methods still decouple the lower-level skill acquisition process and the training of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-15 Alexander C. Li , Carlos Florensa , Ignasi Clavera , Pieter Abbeel

Real-world tasks are often highly structured. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has attracted research interest as an approach for leveraging the hierarchical structure of a given task in reinforcement learning (RL). However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-08 Takayuki Osa , Voot Tangkaratt , Masashi Sugiyama

Model-free reinforcement learning methods lack an inherent mechanism to impose behavioural constraints on the trained policies. Although certain extensions exist, they remain limited to specific types of constraints, such as value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Bram De Cooman , Johan Suykens

Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) seeks to address safety constraints by learning from static datasets and restricting exploration. However, these approaches heavily rely on the dataset and struggle to generalize to unseen scenarios…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Chenyang Cao , Yucheng Xin , Silang Wu , Longxiang He , Zichen Yan , Junbo Tan , Xueqian Wang

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) aims at pre-training agents that can solve a wide range of downstream tasks in complex environments. Despite recent advancements, existing approaches suffer from several limitations: they may require…

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) enables robots to perform some intelligent tasks end-to-end. However, there are still many challenges for long-horizon sparse-reward robotic manipulator tasks. On the one hand, a sparse-reward setting…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Guangming Wang , Minjian Xin , Wenhua Wu , Zhe Liu , Hesheng Wang

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown its promising capabilities to learn optimal policies directly from trial and error. However, learning can be hindered if the goal of the learning, defined by the reward function, is "not optimal".…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-09 Yizheng Zhang , Andre Rosendo