English

Quantile Q-Learning: Revisiting Offline Extreme Q-Learning with Quantile Regression

Machine Learning 2026-04-15 v2

Abstract

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from fixed datasets without further environment interaction, making it particularly valuable in high-risk or costly domains. Extreme QQ-Learning (XQL) is a recent offline RL method that models Bellman errors using the Extreme Value Theorem, yielding strong empirical performance. However, XQL and its stabilized variant MXQL suffer from notable limitations: both require extensive hyperparameter tuning specific to each dataset and domain, and also exhibit instability during training. To address these issues, we proposed a principled method to estimate the temperature coefficient β\beta via quantile regression under mild assumptions. To further improve training stability, we introduce a value regularization technique with mild generalization, inspired by recent advances in constrained value learning. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves competitive or superior performance across a range of benchmark tasks, including D4RL and NeoRL2, while maintaining stable training dynamics and using a consistent set of hyperparameters across all datasets and domains.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.11973,
  title  = {Quantile Q-Learning: Revisiting Offline Extreme Q-Learning with Quantile Regression},
  author = {Xinming Gao and Shangzhe Li and Yujin Cai and Wenwu Yu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.11973},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted by TMLR 2026; Code available at: https://github.com/yunqianevergarden/Quantile-Q-Learning

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:38:36.990Z