New research explores reinforcement learning advancements across multiple domains · 10 sources tracked
ByPulseAugur Editorial·[337 sources]·
Multiple research papers published on arXiv explore advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) and its applications. One study focuses on improving the interpretability of RL policies through decision-tree pruning, demonstrating effectiveness on control benchmarks. Another paper introduces a game-theoretic inverse reinforcement learning approach for predicting human driving behavior, showing improved accuracy over existing methods. Additionally, research investigates explainable AI (XAI) support in human-agent collaboration, the synergy between RL components for sample-efficient control, and network modernization for multi-objective RL. Other papers delve into trajectory-relative hindsight distillation, credit-conserving action-to-token allocation, and RL in simulated clinical environments for medical training.
AI
IMPACT
Advances in reinforcement learning techniques could lead to more efficient and interpretable AI systems across various domains, from autonomous driving to clinical decision-making.
RANK_REASON
Multiple arXiv papers on reinforcement learning techniques and applications.
arXiv:2609.04094v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards works well when a task has a programmatic checker, but most long-horizon agent domains have none. We work in the outcome-blind setting, where ground-truth success signals are not availa…
Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards works well when a task has a programmatic checker, but most long-horizon agent domains have none. We work in the outcome-blind setting, where ground-truth success signals are not available. Multi-criteria rubrics are a popular way to…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Chenyu Zhou, Qiliang Jiang, Shuning Wu, Xu Zhou·
arXiv:2609.02417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-turn agentic RL increasingly treats credit assignment as a targeting problem: given a terminal verifiable reward, per-turn methods localize credit onto the turns that mattered. We identify the structural quantity that predic…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Yongshi Ye, Tian Lan, Feihu Jiang, Muyang Ye, Bin Zhu, Qianghuai Jia, Longyue Wang, Zhao Xu, Weihua Luo, Xiaodong Shi·
arXiv:2609.02074v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Planning is a central capability that enables agents to decompose complex long-horizon tasks into manageable steps. Test-time search and training-based methods improve planning but incur high inference costs or require expensive tra…
DRACO dynamically generates rubrics and redistributes trajectory-level scores into per-step advantages for reinforcement learning without verifiers, improving long-horizon agent performance.
arXiv:2608.27906v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Interactive web application generation requires models to produce usable HTML, CSS, and JavaScript applications from natural language requests. Unlike conventional code generation, application quality depends on multiple user-fa…
arXiv:2608.28128v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-grained credit assignment is a central challenge in reinforcement learning for long horizon LLM agents. Standard objectives often train from programmatically verifiable terminal rewards by broadcasting each sparse outcome to ev…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Steven Morad, Chris Lu, Ryan Kortvelesy, Stephan Liwicki, Jakob Foerster, Amanda Prorok·
arXiv:2402.09900v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Memory models such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Transformers address Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) by mapping trajectories to latent Markov states. Neither model scales particularly wel…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Chenyang Cao, Miguel Rogel-Garc\'ia, Mohamed Nabail, Xueqian Wang, Nicholas Rhinehart·
arXiv:2507.00611v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) provides a promising alternative to heuristic reward design in complex robotic environments. However, PbRL often suffers from poor sample efficiency, requiring extensive and c…
arXiv:2608.26116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing methods for exploring cellular automata and other complex systems mostly operate in open loop: they set initial conditions, execute a full simulation, and observe the outcome, without intervening during execution. We introd…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Yihang Yao, Bo Pang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Ding Zhao, Shafiq Joty, Semih Yavuz·
arXiv:2608.22631v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Terminal agents are a compelling application of large language models (LLMs), with the potential to integrate deeply into users' daily workflows. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key technique for improving their capabilities, m…
arXiv:2608.26659v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent progress in offline reinforcement learning (RL) has been driven by expressive generative actors such as diffusion and flow-matching policies, which capture multimodal behavior in offline datasets. However, these actors requir…
arXiv:2608.26571v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contrastive reinforcement learning (CRL) scales effectively in goal-conditioned tasks by casting policy learning into a self-supervised contrastive objective. However, in a failure-terminated Markov decision process, established CRL…
arXiv:2608.26481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a single policy is trained in parallel across multiple environments of the same task, such as procedurally generated levels, randomized dynamics, or curricula, implementations commonly use one critic across all sampled environm…
arXiv:2608.26469v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In many reinforcement learning (RL) domains, environments are connected by prerequisite relations, such as difficulty-increasing edits or parameter increments, which induce a directed acyclic curriculum graph (DAG). Although this st…
arXiv cs.CL
TIER_1English(EN)·Zhuochun Li, Yuelyu Ji, Yiming Zeng, Daqing He·
arXiv:2608.26550v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning-based knowledge distillation has the potential to transfer complex reasoning from teacher to student models, yet it currently faces a critical dilemma: researchers must choose between sparse outcome-based rewa…
RCCA improves reinforcement learning for interactive web app generation by assigning localized credit to code regions based on rubric-level feedback, yielding substantial benchmark gains.
arXiv:2603.02203v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for Recursive Self-Improving AI (RSI) by adapting Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) on unlabeled test inputs, using self-consensus rewards derived fro…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Haocheng Sun (Beijing University of Posts,Telecommunications), Mulai Tan (Air Force Engineering University)·
arXiv:2608.25419v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Beyond-visual-range (BVR) air combat is a challenging reinforcement-learning domain characterized by partial observability, long-horizon decision making, energy management, and limited weapons. We present BVR Sim, an open-source G…
arXiv cs.CL
TIER_1English(EN)·Donovan Clay, Saket Gollapudi, Sankar Harilal, Min Jang, Jacob Morrison, Sewoong Oh, Natasha Jaques·
arXiv:2608.24949v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has emerged as a powerful framework for enhancing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), enabling impressive reasoning, math, and coding capabilities. Yet for many researchers a…
arXiv:2507.13579v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As everyday use cases of large language model (LLM) AI assistants have expanded, it is becoming increasingly important to personalize responses to align to different users' preferences and goals. While reinforcement learning fro…
arXiv:2608.25460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Alignment auditing of frontier models increasingly relies on LLM auditors to surface undesirable behaviors at scale, but current automated auditors can struggle with coherent investigation and audit realism. In this work, we impro…
Discrete diffusion models have become a strong, widely adopted class of generators for sequence data, and steering them toward a downstream reward at inference time, without any retraining, is increasingly important. Such training-free steering is done by gradient guidance, by se…
Beyond-visual-range (BVR) air combat is a challenging reinforcement-learning domain characterized by partial observability, long-horizon decision making, energy management, and limited weapons. We present BVR Sim, an open-source Gymnasium-style environment designed for heterogene…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Tiberiu-Andrei Georgescu, Alexander W. Goodall, Dalal Alrajeh, Francesco Belardinelli, Sebastian Uchitel·
arXiv:2511.02605v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Shielding is widely used to enforce safety in reinforcement learning (RL), ensuring that an agent's actions remain compliant with formal specifications. Classical shielding approaches, however, are often static, in the sense tha…
arXiv:2601.19969v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Human-in-the-loop guidance has emerged as an effective approach for accelerating online reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world manipulation. However, existing human-in-the-loop RL (HiL-RL) frameworks often suffer from l…
arXiv:2604.01024v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study model-based learning of finite-window policies in tabular partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). A common approach to learning under partial observability is to approximate unbounded history dependenci…
arXiv:2510.01527v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as versatile foundation models for computational chemistry, handling bidirectional tasks like reaction prediction and retrosynthesis. However, these models often lack round-trip consiste…
arXiv:2608.23939v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning is intrinsically multi-objective: a policy must remain compatible with the behavioral support of a fixed dataset while preferentially selecting high-value actions. We recast these objectives in a commo…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Mani Hamidi, Terrence W. Deacon·
arXiv:2507.11482v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial learning systems are graduating from passive learners to increasingly autonomous agents, lending pragmatic urgency to the question of what constitutes agency. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers arguably the most expli…
Marginalized importance weighting evaluates a target policy by reweighting offline state-action samples with its discounted occupancy ratio, characterized by an adjoint Bellman equation. Existing minimax, primal-dual, and fitted fixed-point estimators can leave residual occupancy…
Large language model (LLM) agents are trained with reinforcement learning (RL) for complex decision-making tasks. However, most RL-trained agents remain episodic and cannot accumulate reusable knowledge across episodes. Recent skill-based approaches, such as SkillRL, attempt to a…
arXiv:2608.20909v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline RL methods commonly jointly train the actor and critic, where the critic is used to guide the actor toward higher-value actions. This coupled learning process is well motivated in online RL, where an improved actor collects …
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Lars van der Laan, Aur\'elien Bibaut, Nathan Kallus·
arXiv:2512.24407v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In many sequential decision-making problems, researchers observe actions but not the rewards that drive behavior, yet still wish to evaluate and compare counterfactual policies. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) and dynamic d…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Varun Giridhar, Anant Khandelwal, Jeremy A. Collins, Ignat Georgiev, Animesh Garg·
arXiv:2608.21204v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Behaviour Cloning (BC) has driven remarkable progress in robot manipulation, yet it is fundamentally limited by its inability to self-improve: a policy that fails cannot learn from that failure without additional human demonstrati…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Tanachai Anakewat, Takayuki Osa, Tatsuya Harada·
arXiv:2608.19684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent studies investigate how to leverage pre-collected datasets to improve the policy performance and sample efficiency of RL. One promising approach to achieve this goal is to employ a two-stage strategy: In the first stage, dive…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Astrid Horn Brorholt (Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark), Maris F. L. Galesloot (Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands), Nils Jansen (Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands), Kim Guldstrand Larsen (Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark), Christi…·
arXiv:2608.19836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Probabilistic shielding is a technique for safe reinforcement learning (RL). Typically, a static observer -- called the shield -- constrains the learning agent's actions to those for which acting safely remains feasible. Tradition…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Dayang Liang, Lang Feng, Bo An, Yunlong Liu·
arXiv:2608.19842v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) has become a critical stage in the post-training of large language models. Existing critic-free, group-relative methods estimate policy advantages from multiple rollouts, avoiding the substantial …
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Jin Li, Ye Luo, Zigan Wang, Xiaowei Zhang·
arXiv:2103.04021v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the standard data analysis framework, data is collected (once and for all), and then data analysis is carried out. However, with the advancement of digital technology, decision-makers constantly analyze past data and ge…
arXiv:2605.10546v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Pixel-based deep reinforcement learning agents are typically trained on heavily downsampled visual observations, a convention inherited from early benchmarks rather than grounded in principled design. In this work, we show that …
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Fahim Tajwar, Guanning Zeng, Yueer Zhou, Yuda Song, Daman Arora, Yiding Jiang, Jeff Schneider, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Haiwen Feng, Andrea Zanette·
arXiv:2602.02710v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is the method of choice for training models in setups where the objective function can only be evaluated by sampling from the model. Our key observation is that when the feedback is terminal and binar…
arXiv:2511.03618v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we formalize the almost sure convergence of $Q$-learning and linear temporal difference (TD) learning with Markovian samples using the Lean 4 theorem prover based on the Mathlib library. $Q$-learning and linear TD…
arXiv:2607.13854v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal agents that think with images iteratively manipulate visual evidence and invoke tools across many steps. Existing reinforcement learning methods reduce trajectories to scalar rewards, forcing the policy to discover re…
Offline reinforcement learning improves robotic policies using previously collected data without further environment interaction. Yet prevalent diffusion- and flow-matching robot policies lack tractable likelihoods, limiting their use in likelihood-based offline RL post-training.…
Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) has become a critical stage in the post-training of large language models. Existing critic-free, group-relative methods estimate policy advantages from multiple rollouts, avoiding the substantial memory overhead of conventional proximal policy …
arXiv:2608.18852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent frameworks increasingly package procedural knowledge as skills: instruction files an agent reads on demand, while public libraries now hold thousands of them. Which skill to read has thus become a decision the policy itself ma…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Yugu Li, Jimmy Cao, Jianglin Qiao, Siyi Hu·
arXiv:2608.18682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training multi-turn agentic workflows with reinforcement learning (RL) enables large language models to perform complex reasoning, use external tools, and conduct iterative search beyond single-turn settings. Yet multi-turn RL train…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Taehyung Kim, Jongeun Choi·
arXiv:2608.18770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning a reward model from human feedback and optimizing a policy against it is one approach to aligning AI systems with individual users. From a fairness perspective, existing work improves such alignment by developing data-effic…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Tyler Kastner, Nimrod De La Vega, Amir-massoud Farahmand·
arXiv:2608.18319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural networks trained on nonstationary tasks frequently lose the ability to fit new targets, a phenomenon referred to as loss of plasticity. We identify a novel source of plasticity loss due to the growing anisotropy of weight mat…
arXiv:2509.19893v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a key driver of post-training for complex reasoning in large language models (LLMs), yet online RL introduces substantial instability and computational overhead. Offline RL offers a com…
arXiv:2509.04100v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper explores the combination of Reinforcement Learning (RL) and search-based path planners to speed up the optimization of flight paths for airliners, where in case of emergency a fast route re-calculation can be crucial.…
arXiv:2608.18827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reward function design remains a bottleneck in reinforcement learning. While large language models (LLMs) have enabled automated reward generation, existing methods generate and revise reward functions as monolithic programs, maki…
Learning a reward model from human feedback and optimizing a policy against it is one approach to aligning AI systems with individual users. From a fairness perspective, existing work improves such alignment by developing data-efficient and accurate reward models that capture min…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Hoda Yamani, Henry Williams, Bruce A. MacDonald·
arXiv:2608.17373v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sample efficiency is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in image-based domains where agents must learn from high-dimensional visual inputs. Traditional sampling often relies on random or suboptimal ex…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Kasper Engelen, Sebastian Junges, Guillermo A. P\'{e}rez, Marnix Suilen·
arXiv:2608.17929v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust Markov decision processes optimize one policy against a set of plausible transition functions. This can be conservative when the unknown dynamics are fixed and become partially identifiable after deployment. We study adaptive…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Jianan Zhou, Jung-Hoon Cho, Tianyue Zhou, Han Zheng, Jie Zhang, Roy Dong, Yining Ma, Cathy Wu·
arXiv:2608.17180v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contextual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) seeks to generalize classical RL by maximizing task coverage across a context space of related tasks. While prior works often train from scratch and rely on either multi-task learning for a …
arXiv:2608.17181v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) theory fundamentally depends on probability theory through the Markov chain. There is a deep connection between probability theory and potential theory. This paper reviews that connection and explores the…
arXiv:2608.17587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Expert-written natural language skills can improve tool-using agents, yet agent-authored skills perform 8-11 points worse than using no skill. This gap suggests that following procedural guidance and improving it from execution evid…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Christophe D. Hounwanou, John Emeka Eze, Ya\'e U. Gaba·
arXiv:2608.18008v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Combining large language models with reinforcement learning is increasingly explored, yet the theoretical status of LLM-derived reward signals is often left implicit. We formalize the hybrid LLM-planner and RL-controller architect…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Hoda Yamani, Yuning Xing, Koen van Rijnsoever, Bruce A. MacDonald, Henry Williams·
arXiv:2608.17347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Repetition is a fundamental mechanism in human learning, where revisiting successful experiences strengthens memory, consolidates skills, and improves future performance. Motivated by this biological principle, we introduce Instant …
SkillGate fixes selector credit starvation in agent skill selection by separating outcome credit for execution tokens from local advantage for skill-naming tokens, improving success rates and reducing misleading skill exposure.
Robust Markov decision processes optimize one policy against a set of plausible transition functions. This can be conservative when the unknown dynamics are fixed and become partially identifiable after deployment. We study adaptive policy portfolios: finite sets of memoryless ra…
Sample efficiency is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in image-based domains where agents must learn from high-dimensional visual inputs. Traditional sampling often relies on random or suboptimal experience selection, leading to redundant updates a…
arXiv:2608.16739v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning algorithms for Large Language Models (LLMs) are largely distinguished by their variance reduction strategy. Group-relative methods like GRPO reduce gradient variance by sampling multiple rollouts per prompt, b…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Ege C. Kaya, Mahsa Ghasemi, Abolfazl Hashemi·
arXiv:2603.06946v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many distributional quantities in reinforcement learning are intrinsically joint across actions, including distributions of gaps and probabilities of superiority. However, the classical Markov decision process (MDP) formalism sp…
arXiv:2608.15509v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Task guided agents demonstrate strong performance in a wide range of complex tasks. However, most existing task representation algorithms are tailored to specific contexts and struggle to generalize across diverse scenarios. Moreo…
arXiv:2608.16888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The development of safe and beneficial AI requires that systems can learn and act in accordance with human preferences. However, explicitly specifying these preferences by hand is often infeasible. Inverse reinforcement learning (IR…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Minjae Cho, Hiroyasu Tsukamoto, Huy T. Tran·
arXiv:2506.15700v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Control contraction metrics (CCMs)-defined by Riemannian metrics under which a closed-loop system is incrementally exponentially stable-offer a constructive framework for synthesizing contracting policies in nonlinear path…
arXiv:2608.16072v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) with group-relative advantages has become the de facto standard for post-training language model reasoners. However, when optimizing multiple reward objectives, existing methods typically scalarize the …
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Joanikij Chulev, Hendrik Baier·
arXiv:2608.14963v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pareto Conditioned Networks learn multiple multi-objective reinforcement learning behaviours by conditioning a single policy on a desired return command. However, the local mapping from command and state to action remains opaque. …
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Jasmina Gajcin, Juan C. Rosero, Ivana Dusparic·
arXiv:2608.14620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been extensively used in autonomous and self-* systems, but RL policies, especially deep RL ones relying on neural networks, lack transparency and are difficult to understand. This can lead to dimin…
arXiv:2608.16831v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative pretraining established reusable task representations; later work on language-based task conditioning and in-context learning showed that a fixed model could adapt its behavior from instructions and demonstrations. Policy…
arXiv:2608.16666v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents Chronocooked, a reinforcement learning (RL) benchmark suite for studying implicit interval timing in RL agents. Inspired by Overcooked, the suite comprises cooking scenarios that require temporal decision making.…
arXiv:2608.15700v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Background: Distillation of training targets generated thru search/planning has proven useful in reinforcement learning, but search can take exceedingly long. Objectives: Rather than perform search to the same depth every time (typi…
This paper presents Chronocooked, a reinforcement learning (RL) benchmark suite for studying implicit interval timing in RL agents. Inspired by Overcooked, the suite comprises cooking scenarios that require temporal decision making. The tasks and reward functions are designed suc…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Alessandro Abate, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Mathias Jackermeier, Jan Kret\'insk\'y, Maximilian Prokop, Christoph Weinhuber·
arXiv:2602.06746v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study multi-task reinforcement learning (RL), a setting in which an agent learns a single, universal policy capable of generalising to arbitrary, possibly unseen tasks. We consider tasks specified as linear temporal logic (LT…
This paper studies policy learning for distributed task allocation in open multi-agent systems, where agents may join and leave in a time-varying fashion, with submodular stage team utilities. At each time, the active agents select actions from local categorical policies such tha…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Wenhan Xu, Jiashuo Jiang, Lei Deng, Danny Hin-Kwok Tsang·
arXiv:2506.04291v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: With the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the demand for addressing complex optimization challenges has intensified. The Lyapunov Drift-Plus-Penalty algorithm is a widely adopted approach for ensuring queue sta…
arXiv:2608.12917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Developing effective robot navigation methods in crowded environments is essential for real-world applications. Although recent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods have improved navigation performance in crowded environments, …
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·C. F. Maximilian Nagy, Onur Celik, Emiliyan Gospodinov, Florian Seligmann, Weiran Liao, Aryan Kaushik, Gerhard Neumann·
arXiv:2603.01891v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Action chunking improves exploration and accelerates value propagation in long-horizon reinforcement learning, but naively applying off-policy methods to the temporally extended action space at reduced decision frequency offsets…
arXiv:2608.12146v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models for reinforcement learning (RL) couples two load-balancing problems: sequence composition determines dense attention work in each data-parallel microbatch, while token routing determines sp…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Zijian Zhao, Sen Li·
arXiv:2608.11658v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many reinforcement learning systems, from fleet management to traffic signal control, must serve an objective that changes dynamically after deployment, and retraining a policy for each new objective is prohibitively expensive. Fo…
arXiv:2605.12236v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning pre-trained robot policies with reinforcement learning (RL) often inherits the bottlenecks introduced by pre-training with behavioral cloning (BC), which produces narrow action distributions that lack the cover…
arXiv:2608.11226v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement-learning post-training dominates modern language-model development, yet its power behavior on GPU hardware has not been characterized, and datacenters manage GPU power with workload-blind mechanisms, static caps and re…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Shreyas Kowshik, Sreyas Venkataraman, Leo Wang, Niharika Pant, Max Simchowitz, Aviral Kumar·
arXiv:2608.11363v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central goal in robot learning is to move beyond task-specific human data collection toward robots that improve through autonomous interaction. Yet fully autonomous learning remains difficult with current policies: sparse reward…
arXiv:2608.11560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalizing marketing messages with contextual multi-armed bandits (CMABs) drives real business value, yet the objective that ultimately matters - a downstream conversion - is observed only weeks later, too late to drive online le…
Many reinforcement learning systems, from fleet management to traffic signal control, must serve an objective that changes dynamically after deployment, and retraining a policy for each new objective is prohibitively expensive. For a single agent, this problem is well understood:…
Many reinforcement learning systems, from fleet management to traffic signal control, must serve an objective that changes dynamically after deployment, and retraining a policy for each new objective is prohibitively expensive. For a single agent, this problem is well understood:…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Tamar Gozlan, Claudia V. Goldman·
arXiv:2608.09967v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents achieve strong performance in complex environments, yet their decision-making processes remain difficult to interpret. We introduce SPOT (Sampling Policy Observation Tree), a novel model-agno…
arXiv:2608.10473v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline-to-online (O2O) reinforcement learning aims to leverage policies pretrained on static datasets while improving them through online interaction. However, directly reusing an offline-trained critic can hinder online fine-tun…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Zelei Cheng, Amritansh Mishra, Sambit Sahu, William Campbell·
arXiv:2608.10357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-horizon tool-using agents must reason over user goals, domain policies, tool calls, simulator state, and delayed verifiable rewards. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural fit for this setting, but multi-turn on-policy roll…
arXiv:2608.10634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL), which learns environment dynamics to generate synthetic experience, is a promising approach to sample-efficient decision making. Numerous methods have been developed to improve dynamics pre…
arXiv:2608.10204v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning maximizes reward subject to safety constraints. For Constrained Markov Decision Processes, the linear-programming view over occupancy measures implies that whenever the constraint is active at optimality,…
arXiv:2608.10499v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Personalized Federated Reinforcement Learning (PFRL) takes a decentralized approach to storing and accessing information based on past experiences while keeping each client's data private during the learning of each client's polic…
Personalizing marketing messages with contextual multi-armed bandits (CMABs) drives real business value, yet the objective that ultimately matters - a downstream conversion - is observed only weeks later, too late to drive online learning. Teams therefore train the bandit on a fa…
Personalized Federated Reinforcement Learning (PFRL) takes a decentralized approach to storing and accessing information based on past experiences while keeping each client's data private during the learning of each client's policy. Many current methods for PFRL rely heavily on e…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Jinkun Hou, Zhuo Liu, Huimin Ren, Hongsheng Xin, Pan Zhou, Kun Zhan·
arXiv:2608.09123v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) for open-ended tasks is challenging because responses must satisfy multidimensional criteria without following a single correct generation trajectory. Existing rubric-based reinforcement learnin…
arXiv:2411.01302v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the convergence of $q$-learning and related algorithms introduced by Jia and Zhou (J. Mach. Learn. Res., 24 (2023), 161) for controlled diffusion processes. For exploratory policy improvement, we establish exponential c…
arXiv:2608.09617v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Symbolic regression is the problem of finding an algebraic expression describing a stochastic dependence of a target variable on a set of inputs. Unlike forms of regression that fit parameters assuming a fixed model structure, symbo…
arXiv:2608.08673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work explores the relationship between task similarity and catastrophic forgetting in reinforcement learning. Catastrophic forgetting, the phenomenon in machine learning of losing the ability to effectively perform on previous …
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Ni Mu, Yao Luan, Yiqin Yang, Qing-Shan Jia·
arXiv:2608.08604v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a powerful framework for solving complex collaborative tasks, but it relies heavily on well-defined global reward functions. Designing such rewards is challenging, especially in systems w…
arXiv:2608.08224v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning post-training unlocks complex reasoning in LLMs. Yet benchmark scores reveal only whether a model improved, not what changed inside it, nor how it splits finite capability across tasks. A representative interp…
arXiv:2608.07772v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study policy-based reinforcement learning under the $\mu$-resets interaction protocol of Kakade and Langford [KL02]. This interaction protocol enables the learner to sample trajectories from a given exploratory reset distribution…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Ibne Farabi Shihab, Abu Sa-Adat Mohamed Moon-Im Al Ahsan, Md Najmus Swaqeeb·
arXiv:2608.07725v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Average-reward reinforcement-learning regret is known up to logarithmic factors, but the numerical content of published guarantees is difficult to compare because probability mode, structural parameter, logarithmic normalization, pr…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Ibne Farabi Shihab, Sanjeda Akter, Abu Sa-Adat Mohamed Moon-Im Al Ahsan, Md Najmus Swaqeeb, Anuj Sharma·
arXiv:2608.07719v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning repeatedly trains policies from a fixed transition pool, making redundant data costly across seeds and hyperparameters, while naive subsampling can remove rare transitions needed for long-horizon credi…
arXiv:2608.08255v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) often suffers from delayed and sparse rewards in real-world environments. A promising solution to this challenge is credit assignment, which aims to decompose trajectory-level rewards and provid…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Mohamed A. Mohamed, Kateryna Nekhomiazh, Vedant Vyas, Marcos M. Jose, Andrew Patterson, Marlos C. Machado·
arXiv:2505.18347v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual reinforcement learning (RL) concerns agents that are expected to learn continually, rather than converge to a policy that is then fixed for evaluation. This setting is well-suited to environments that the agent p…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·David D. Yuan, Tony Z. Zhao, Kaylee Burns, Chelsea Finn·
arXiv:2608.09138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While learned robotic policies hold promise for advancing generalizable manipulation, their practical deployment is often hindered by suboptimal execution speeds. Imitation learning policies are inherently limited by hardware cons…
arXiv:2608.09555v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: External natural-language skills provide large language model (LLM) agents with reusable and editable guidance for solving complex tasks. Yet their effectiveness depends not only on skill quality, but also on whether the policy can …
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Fabio Pavirani, Bert Claessens, Pierre Pinson, Chris Develder·
arXiv:2608.09335v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multistage stochastic model predictive control (MPC) handles uncertainty by optimizing over a scenario tree, a finite branching approximation of future outcomes constructed from sampled forecasts. To build such a tree, conventional …
arXiv:2608.09324v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On unlabeled test data, reinforcement learning lacks a ground-truth reward; test-time RL methods derive one from the model's own roll-outs, rewarding those that match the majority vote over $N$ sampled answers. That vote discards a …
arXiv:2608.08158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse, delayed, and weakly informative rewards remain central obstacles to efficient reinforcement learning. Reward shaping addresses these limitations by supplementing the task reward with an auxiliary signal that can accelerate l…
Multistage stochastic model predictive control (MPC) handles uncertainty by optimizing over a scenario tree, a finite branching approximation of future outcomes constructed from sampled forecasts. To build such a tree, conventional methods focus on matching the underlying probabi…
While learned robotic policies hold promise for advancing generalizable manipulation, their practical deployment is often hindered by suboptimal execution speeds. Imitation learning policies are inherently limited by hardware constraints and the speed of the operator during data …
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Lichao Ma, Yang Sun, Shuaitao Zhao, Yangyi Fang, Cong Qin, Xiaoliang Fu, Yuhang Tian, Yuchen Wei, Junbo Zhu, Yang Wei, Lu Pan, Jiaye Lin·
arXiv:2608.07118v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Credit assignment in multi-turn agent reinforcement learning operates at two levels: assigning trajectory-level credit to actions and distributing each action's credit across its tokens. In this paper, we introduce FACTOR, which sep…
arXiv:2608.06445v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Capturing the strategic decision-making inherent in competitive human driving is critical for autonomous vehicle safety and traffic simulation. This study demonstrates that game-theoretic Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) provi…
arXiv:2608.07371v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent agentic reinforcement learning methods use hindsight to complement sparse outcome rewards. However, a completed rollout can yield many such signals, leaving their appropriate allocation across turns unclear. We introduce TR…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Mateus Levi Sim\~oes Fernandes, Alberto Sardinha·
arXiv:2608.06381v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Explainable AI (XAI) has shown promise for human-agent collaboration, yet results rely on hand-crafted policies in custom environments, limiting generalizability to state-of-the-art teaming research. We provide the first systemati…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Mark Leon Ringer, Michel Tokic·
arXiv:2608.07151v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning policies are difficult to inspect, but interpreting them is a prerequisite for trustworthiness. Converting a trained policy into explicit decision-tree rules improves transparency and the resulting artifacts…
arXiv:2608.07086v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning systems are significantly more complex than other machine learning paradigms due to inherent properties, causing RL system design to jointly account for many tightly coupled factors. Despite advances in indi…
arXiv:2608.06595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural networks applied to sequential decision-making tasks typically rely on latent representations of environment states. While environment dynamics dictate how semantic states evolve, the corresponding latent transitions are us…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Adam \v{S}tafa, Santeri Heiskanen, Petr Novotn\'y, Joni Pajarinen·
arXiv:2608.07180v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have shown that improving neural network architectures can yield substantial gains in sample efficiency and asymptotic performance without altering the underlying algorithms. In …
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Valentin Li\'{e}vin, Samuel Schmidgall, Tim Strother, Alex Bijamov, Akshay Goel, Anil Palepu, Chunjong Park, Vahid Balazadeh, Min Woo Sun, Marius Guerard, Justin Chen, Dave Steiner, Vikram Dhillon, Ibrahim Azar, Akhil Mehta, Nicholas Spetsieris, Shilpan …·
arXiv:2608.07418v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In medical education, physicians convert academic knowledge into clinical expertise through residency: years of training across thousands of encounters, with diverse sources of feedback and progressively greater autonomy. Much of cl…
Multi-agent simulations are widely used to study complex social and ecological systems, where rich and often unexpected emergent behaviors arise from local interactions. A large body of prior work has focused on analyzing such emergent dynamics across domains. In this paper, we m…
arXiv:2608.06197v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training large language model agents for long-horizon tool use typically relies on interactions with real or synthesized executable environments, whose construction and verification are costly, or on external simulators that are dif…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Muyang Ye, Tian Lan, Feihu Jiang, Yongshi Ye, Wuyunsiqin, Bin Zhu, Qianghuai Jia, Zhao Xu, Weihua Luo, Ye Wang, Jinyang Zhang, Longyue Wang, Lingfeng Bao·
arXiv:2608.05245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reusable skills, which encapsulate the procedural knowledge required to solve real-world professional tasks, offer LLM-based agents a path toward self-evolution in expert domains. Existing self-evolving skill methods construct skill…
arXiv:2608.05989v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sample-efficient policy learning from pixels is a long-standing challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Recent dynamics-based representation learning methods have significantly improved the sample efficiency of model-free visual R…
arXiv:2608.06310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in reward modeling show a paradigm shift from discriminative reward models to generative reward models. However, despite their strong capabilities in response ranking, generative reward models have not realized the…
arXiv:2608.06105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted navigation can help Arctic shipping adapt to rapidly changing sea-ice conditions, but reliable deployment requires reward models that are interpretable and robust to changing environments. Inv…
arXiv:2608.05588v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding (LMAPF) requires repeatedly planning collision-free paths for agents that continuously receive new goals upon reaching their current ones. While many learning-based planners have been proposed for…
arXiv:2608.05987v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards constructs trajectory-level advantage estimates, yet it often fails to credit the few pivotal decisions that determine outcomes in long-horizon, multi-turn agentic tasks. Recent wo…
arXiv:2608.06025v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In simulation-in-the-loop decision-making systems, reinforcement learning (RL) inference is often constrained by simulator-side execution overhead, where workloads are highly dynamic and sensitive to runtime thread configurations. E…
Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted navigation can help Arctic shipping adapt to rapidly changing sea-ice conditions, but reliable deployment requires reward models that are interpretable and robust to changing environments. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) provides a frame…
Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted navigation can help Arctic shipping adapt to rapidly changing sea-ice conditions, but reliable deployment requires reward models that are interpretable and robust to changing environments. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) provides a frame…
In simulation-in-the-loop decision-making systems, reinforcement learning (RL) inference is often constrained by simulator-side execution overhead, where workloads are highly dynamic and sensitive to runtime thread configurations. Existing multithreaded strategies struggle to mat…
Sample-efficient policy learning from pixels is a long-standing challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Recent dynamics-based representation learning methods have significantly improved the sample efficiency of model-free visual RL by learning dynamics-aware representations thr…
Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding (LMAPF) requires repeatedly planning collision-free paths for agents that continuously receive new goals upon reaching their current ones. While many learning-based planners have been proposed for LMAPF, most rely on oversimplified kinematic assu…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Mohammadsaeed Haghi, Mahdi Salmani, Nima Kelidari·
arXiv:2608.04669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many social services assign scarce resources, such as housing assistance or hospital interventions, to people who arrive one at a time: each arrival must receive a decision immediately, and the long-run usage of every resource must …
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Bohai Gu, Yueyang Yuan, Taiyi Wu, Dazhao Du, Jian Liu, Xiaoyi Pang, Jie Zhang, Xiaocheng Lu, Haobin Zhong, Xiaotong Zhao, Alan Zhao, Song Guo·
arXiv:2608.04964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interactive video world models are essential for long-horizon planning and exploration, yet they suffer from compounding errors. Post-training methods such as reinforcement learning (RL) can improve these models, but they hit a veri…
arXiv:2608.04317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous cyber defense systems based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have attracted significant research attention, yet remain evaluated almost exclusively against static, heuristic red agents, leaving their robustness agai…
arXiv:2608.04732v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safe actor-critic control often treats barrier filtering, uncertainty estimation, and experience replay as separate modules, even though each changes the data used for learning and control. We develop an integrated architecture in…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Yi Yang, Cong Qin, Xiaodan Liu, Chishui Chen, Qing Dong, Yan Zhang, Cao Liu, Zhao Yang, Lu Pan, Jiaye Lin, Yi Feng·
arXiv:2608.04788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model agents are commonly trained through reinforcement learning with sparse trajectory-level rewards, which offer limited guidance on how strongly individual tokens should be updated. On-Policy Self-Distillation (O…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Akhil S Anand, Shambhuraj Sawant, Paavo Parmas, Jasper Hoffmann, Dirk Reinhardt, Sebastien Gros·
arXiv:2510.17709v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Training Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies using simulation models before deployment in real-world environments is a common strategy when real-world interaction is expensive. This approach is used in sim-to-real RL and …
arXiv:2510.20748v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper demonstrates how reinforcement learning can explain two puzzling empirical patterns in household consumption behavior during economic downturns. I develop a model where agents use Q-learning with neural network …
arXiv:2604.21030v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The integration of Model Predictive Control (MPC) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for constrained decision-making and adaptive control. MPC offers structured optimization, explicit const…
arXiv cs.CL
TIER_1English(EN)·Nhat Minh Pham, Duy Tung Doan, Thi Duyen Ngo, Vinh Van Nguyen, Khac-Hoai Nam Bui·
arXiv:2608.04962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but autoregressive rollout generation remains a major efficiency bottleneck. Speculative decoding can accelerate generation, y…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Rohit Kumar Salla, Manoj Saravanan, Simon Stepputtis·
arXiv:2608.05084v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion policies are a powerful policy class for continuous control, but their iterative denoising process creates a substantial computational bottleneck. Reducing this cost requires adapting the number of denoising steps to the d…
arXiv:2508.13661v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) is the dominant paradigm in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), enabling agents to act independently at test time while leveraging additional information during tra…
Training large language model agents for long-horizon tool use typically relies on interactions with real or synthesized executable environments, whose construction and verification are costly, or on external simulators that are difficult to ground. We introduce EnvACE, an agenti…
Reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards constructs trajectory-level advantage estimates, yet it often fails to credit the few pivotal decisions that determine outcomes in long-horizon, multi-turn agentic tasks. Recent work introduces privileged self-distillation for c…
Large language model agents are commonly trained through reinforcement learning with sparse trajectory-level rewards, which offer limited guidance on how strongly individual tokens should be updated. On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) addresses this by re-scoring generated tokens…
arXiv:2508.20697v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) continue to grow in capability, so do the risks of harmful misuse through fine-tuning. While most prior studies assume that attackers rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) for such misuse, we…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Zixuan Liu, Fangzheng Wu, Brian Summa, Zizhan Zheng·
arXiv:2608.03562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) with general utility extends classic RL by optimizing an arbitrary utility functional of the policy-induced occupancy measure, thereby enabling a broader range of applications. However, previous work on g…
arXiv:2608.03483v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing chunk-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models execute a fixed number of actions (i.e., execution horizon) before replanning, turning replanning into a task-agnostic periodic schedule that is independent of task progress…
arXiv:2608.03545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models without labeled data by updating the policy with pseudo-labels constructed through majority voting. While effective, the reward sig…
arXiv:2608.03660v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) is widely believed to inherently resist catastrophic forgetting in continual post-training of multimodal large language models. Under pronounced task distributional shifts, however, forgetting across …
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Christophe D. Hounwanou, John Emeka Eze, Ya\'e Ulrich Gaba·
arXiv:2608.03502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown strong capabilities in reasoning, planning, and tool-use, enabling new forms of autonomous agents. However, LLM-based agents struggle with long-horizon sequential decision tasks that …
arXiv:2608.02993v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: (Flat) Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents face significant challenges in environments with sparse rewards that require long-horizon reasoning. A compelling approach to improve sample efficiency is to incorporate knowledge into learn…
arXiv cs.CL
TIER_1English(EN)·Fangxu Yu, Tao Feng, Dehai Min, Zinan Lin, Weijia Xu, Michael Xu, Philip S. Yu, Ge Liu, Tianyi Zhou·
arXiv:2608.02831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio reasoning is essential for machine understanding of the acoustic world. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards can elicit such reasoning, yet existing reward designs are complementary in their limitations: outcome-ba…
arXiv:2608.03215v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning for flow-matching text-to-speech is complicated by deterministic ODE sampling: trajectory-level policy-gradient methods typically convert the ODE into an SDE and track per-step likelihood ratios, introducing…
arXiv:2608.03092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We aim to improve model performance in multi-reward reinforcement learning training process. Existing Group reward-Decoupled Normalization Policy Optimization (GDPO) has mitigated the issue of reward signals masking one another du…
arXiv:2608.03068v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective method for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods suffer from insufficient precision in feedback on generated answer …
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Evan Assmus, Qining Zhang, Lei Ying·
arXiv:2608.02951v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) for general stochastic MDPs often requires training a reward model. Existing reward-model-free methods are either restricted to bandits or deterministic MDPs, such as DPO or P3O, or u…
Autonomous cyber defense systems based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have attracted significant research attention, yet remain evaluated almost exclusively against static, heuristic red agents, leaving their robustness against adaptive threats critically understudied. Mean…
Autonomous cyber defense systems based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have attracted significant research attention, yet remain evaluated almost exclusively against static, heuristic red agents, leaving their robustness against adaptive threats critically understudied. Mean…
Interactive video world models are essential for long-horizon planning and exploration, yet they suffer from compounding errors. Post-training methods such as reinforcement learning (RL) can improve these models, but they hit a verification bottleneck: for arbitrary action sequen…
AI agents are expected to play an increasingly important role in future decision-making systems. In this paper, we consider collaborative systems composed of heterogeneous multi-agent systems (MAS), where their members have different capabilities and operating costs. We study how…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown strong capabilities in reasoning, planning, and tool-use, enabling new forms of autonomous agents. However, LLM-based agents struggle with long-horizon sequential decision tasks that require precise action optimization and environm…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Shuai Han, Mehdi Dastani, Shihan Wang·
arXiv:2505.08630v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training cooperative agents in sparse-reward scenarios poses significant challenges for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Without clear feedback on actions at each step in sparse-reward setting, previous methods struggl…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Dominik Wagner, Leon Witzman, Luke Ong·
arXiv:2511.19849v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recurrence objectives, where a target region must be visited infinitely often, are a fundamental class of specifications for Markov decision processes (MDPs) and form the core of $\omega$-regular and linear temporal logic …
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Brahim Driss, Alex Davey, Riad Akrour·
arXiv:2506.13741v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) has emerged as a promising approach for learning behaviors from human feedback without predefined reward functions. However, current PbRL methods face a critical challenge in …
arXiv:2605.18591v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Natural policy gradients improve optimization by accounting for the geometry of distribution space, but their practical use is limited by the cost of estimating and inverting the Fisher matrix. We present Randomized Advantage Tr…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Sterre Lutz, Dani\"el Vos, Matthijs T. J. Spaan, Anna Lukina·
arXiv:2608.02509v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sequential decision-making in real-world applications often involves uncertainty about the environment's model. Uncertain Markov decision processes (UMDPs) represent the possible environments as a set of MDPs with shared states an…
arXiv:2608.01418v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autoregressive rollout generation is a major computational cost in reinforcement learning for large language models. Reusing each rollout batch for additional learner updates amortizes this cost, but later updates become increasin…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Claire Vernade, Onno Eberhard, Martha White, Florian D\"orfler, Csaba Szepesv\'ari, Miroslav Krstic, Michael Muehlebach·
arXiv:2608.02433v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning and control theory are two adjacent scientific fields that focus on optimizing the controller of unknown dynamical systems using feedback. While both fields have common roots in dynamic programming, they have …
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Botao Dong, Longyang Huang, Ning Pang, Hongtian Chen·
arXiv:2608.02332v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In offline reinforcement learning (RL), the distribution shift between behavioral data and the learned policy can lead to erroneous \emph{Q}-value estimation, thereby misguiding the direction of policy optimization. To address this …
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Zhijian Zhou, Long Li, Xuan Zhang, Zongkai Liu, Yulei Qin, Ke Li, Xing Sun, Xiaoyu Tan, Chao Qu, Yuan Qi·
arXiv:2608.02181v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) for large language models typically trains its critic by mean-squared-error (MSE) regression on scalar value targets. Although scalar MSE is statistically valid for estimating the conditional expec…
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 horiz…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Ankur Naskar, Vivek T A, Aditya Kumar, Gugan Thoppe, Prashanth L. A·
arXiv:2608.01917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discounted exponential utility provides a principled criterion for risk-sensitive sequential decision-making, but its nonlinear structure complicates reinforcement learning. A recent work \citep{thoppe2026reinforcement} addressed th…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Wonseok Lee, Jimyeong Kim, Jungmin Ko, Wonjong Rhee·
arXiv:2608.01717v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent reinforcement learning methods for diffusion large language models (dLLMs) commonly rely on on-policy rollouts generated by the target dLLM itself. When successful on-policy rollouts are scarce, however, on-policy training ma…
arXiv:2608.01597v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search-augmented LM agents are typically trained with a binary exact-match reward, which throws away most of what a failed trajectory tells us about why it failed. We introduce HindSearch, a hindsight self-distillation procedure for…
arXiv:2608.00175v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents achieve strong performance by optimizing scalar reward functions. However, once deployed, the policies of these RL agents are often rigid and costly to adapt to new performance criteria. For i…
arXiv cs.CL
TIER_1English(EN)·Jim Dilkes, Vahid Yazdanpanah, Sebastian Stein·
arXiv:2608.02087v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) with Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become an important tool for improving model capabilities, but the LLM action-space structure introduces challenges distinct from classical RL, with i…
arXiv:2608.01743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central paradigm for large language model (LLM) post-training, but optimization toward new objectives can degrade capabilities already present in the base model. KL regularization is widely…
arXiv cs.CL
TIER_1English(EN)·Junhao Shen, Zhanqiu Zhang, Yiwen Guo, Hong Cheng·
arXiv:2608.01678v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing skill generation methods largely rely on heuristics or pipeline-style consolidation, which must be specially designed for different evidence sources. In contrast, learning-based approaches offer a more unified way to mode…
arXiv:2608.00335v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compact web agents can reduce deployment cost, but training them poses challenges in both data collection and post-SFT reinforcement learning (RL). Successful trajectories are expensive to collect and often contain inefficient det…
arXiv cs.CL
TIER_1English(EN)·Xujun Che, Yuchen Yuan, Weida Zhao, Chenyang Yu·
arXiv:2608.00301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Error-penalized scoring rules ($+1$ for a correct answer, $-\lambda$ for a wrong one, $0$ for abstaining) are increasingly prescribed against hallucination: a rational agent facing such a rule answers exactly when its correctness …
arXiv:2608.00485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent Text-to-SQL systems increasingly rely on multi-turn interaction, execution feedback, and reinforcement learning. However, most existing methods use execution correctness only as a trajectory-level reward, which provides limit…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective method for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods suffer from insufficient precision in feedback on generated answer trajectories and exhibit the phenomenon of problem…
Sequential decision-making in real-world applications often involves uncertainty about the environment's model. Uncertain Markov decision processes (UMDPs) represent the possible environments as a set of MDPs with shared states and actions but potentially different transition pro…
Post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) with Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become an important tool for improving model capabilities, but the LLM action-space structure introduces challenges distinct from classical RL, with implications for inducing exploration. New methods …
Discounted exponential utility provides a principled criterion for risk-sensitive sequential decision-making, but its nonlinear structure complicates reinforcement learning. A recent work \citep{thoppe2026reinforcement} addressed this difficulty by introducing a Bellman-compatibl…
arXiv:2603.13319v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for parallel token generation, with block-wise variants garnering significant research interest. Despite their potential, existing dLLMs typically suff…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Yanwei Jia, Du Ouyang·
arXiv:2607.29593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper studies the policy gradient update for a multi-arm bandit problem in diffusion environment that is described by a stochastic differential equation (SDE) under the continuous-time reinforcement learning framework by Wang e…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Anders Jonsson, Emilie Kaufmann, Gianmarco Tedeschi, Lorenzo Steccanella·
arXiv:2607.29294v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present HBPI-UCRL, a model-based algorithm for hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) that learns high-level and low-level policies in parallel. HBPI-UCRL exploits the fact that a high-level transition corresponds to a multi-s…
arXiv:2603.25464v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn a family of policies from a reward-free dataset, and recover optimal policies for any reward function directly at test time. Naturally, the quality of the pretr…
arXiv:2506.13862v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In Reinforcement Learning (RL), regularization with a Kullback-Leibler divergence that penalizes large deviations between successive policies has emerged as a popular tool both in theory and practice. This family of algori…
arXiv:2607.22186v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) accelerates large language model (LLM) post-training by overlapping rollout generation with policy optimization, but the resulting stale, off-policy data can destabilize optimization and …
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Reuben Tan, Baolin Peng, Zhengyuan Yang, Hao Cheng, Oier Mees, Theodore Zhao, Andrea Tupini, Isar Meijer, Qianhui Wu, Yuncong Yang, Lars Liden, Yu Gu, Sheng Zhang, Xiaodong Liu, Lijuan Wang, Marc Pollefeys, Yong Jae Lee, Jianfeng Gao·
arXiv:2512.03438v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic reasoning models trained with multimodal reinforcement learning (MMRL) have become increasingly capable, yet they are almost universally optimized using sparse, outcome-based rewards computed based on the final answers. …
arXiv:2607.28849v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bilevel reinforcement learning (RL) is an important framework within the literature of RL that can be used to formalize various categories of problems, such as meta-learning, hierarchical task decomposition, and reinforcement lear…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Manith Adikari, Bei Peng, Samuele Vinanzi, Angelo Cangelosi·
arXiv:2607.29559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) systems are typically trained using a single, well-specified scalar reward function. However, real-world decision-making tasks often involve multiple, competing objectives, such as performance versus effi…
arXiv:2607.29246v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern large language models (LLMs) are expected not just to answer correctly, but to adapt their behavior to different human values and use cases. As a result, multi-reward reinforcement learning (RL) has become an increasingly imp…
Search-augmented LM agents are typically trained with a binary exact-match reward, which throws away most of what a failed trajectory tells us about why it failed. We introduce HindSearch, a hindsight self-distillation procedure for GRPO: after each rollout, a frozen judge writes…
Existing skill generation methods largely rely on heuristics or pipeline-style consolidation, which must be specially designed for different evidence sources. In contrast, learning-based approaches offer a more unified way to model skill generation across heterogeneous sources. H…
Large language model agents have shown strong potential in complex interactive tasks, yet their reinforcement learning (RL) is often hindered by sparse rewards, as a long multi-turn trajectory may receive only a single outcome-level signal. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) prov…
arXiv:2607.27787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) for mathematical reasoning suffers from a structural blind spot: on "cliff" prompts-those on which every sampled rollout in a group fails-the group-normalized advantage is identi…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Muhammad Adil Saleem, Syed Ali Raza, Mary-Anne Williams·
arXiv:2607.27905v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) enhance the interpretability of black-box models by generating alternative instances with adjusted feature values that achieve a contrastive outcome. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising …
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Javier C. Weddington, Bence P. \"Olveczky, Stephen A. Baccus·
arXiv:2607.26434v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying learned control policies on low-cost robotic platforms introduces transport latencies and noisy motor feedback that systematically widens the sim-to-real gap. The chasm of simulation to deployment in hardware lies in the…
arXiv:2607.28390v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) provide a natural framework for reinforcement learning in safety-critical applications, where agents maximize long-term reward while satisfying long-term constraints. Although primal-dua…
arXiv:2607.28076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is effective for training large language model agents. However, terminal rewards provide only coarse trajectory-level supervision, leaving successful behaviors, recurring mista…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Yuxuan Zhu, Daniel Kang·
arXiv:2603.16140v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has driven recent capability advances of large language models across various domains. Recent studies suggest that improved RLVR algorithms allow models to learn effectively …
arXiv:2512.04697v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies the continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) for optimal switching problems across multiple regimes. We consider a type of exploratory formulation under entropy regularization where the agent randomiz…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Samuel Alexander, Arthur Paul Pedersen·
arXiv:2112.07752v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Researchers have formalized reinforcement learning (RL) in different ways. If an agent in one RL framework is to run within another RL framework's environments, the agent must first be converted, or mapped, into that other…
Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) enhance the interpretability of black-box models by generating alternative instances with adjusted feature values that achieve a contrastive outcome. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising approach for CFE generation, enabling efficient …
Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) for mathematical reasoning suffers from a structural blind spot: on "cliff" prompts-those on which every sampled rollout in a group fails-the group-normalized advantage is identically zero, so GRPO produces no gradient on prec…
arXiv:2607.26509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms for continuous control typically rely on neural value function approximation to guide policy improvement. However, temporal-difference (TD) learning introduces noisy targets, resulti…
arXiv:2607.26873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) enables language models to self-evolve at inference time without labeled feedback. Existing methods rely on answer voting and therefore do not extend naturally to open-ended generation, where …
arXiv:2607.26094v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is the standard approach for aligning large language models with human preferences, but its quality is limited by static, task-agnostic reward models. This mismatch leads to sparse…
arXiv:2607.26417v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse-reward reinforcement learning often fails because rollouts from the unassisted evaluation start rarely reach later task stages. Reset curricula address this by starting some training rollouts from easier intermediate states, …
arXiv:2607.26515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end FP4 RL post-training, in which both the rollout and training policies, including their forward and backward passes, operate at 4-bit precision. A systematic study reveals that the d…
arXiv:2607.26784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model agents often encounter related yet distinct tasks that share reusable solution patterns. Yet standard agentic reinforcement learning treats tasks as independent episodes, while existing approaches to skill learn…
Large language model agents often encounter related yet distinct tasks that share reusable solution patterns. Yet standard agentic reinforcement learning treats tasks as independent episodes, while existing approaches to skill learning either focus on repeated attempts of one tas…
arXiv:2607.25659v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rubric-based reinforcement learning enriches language model training by evaluating model outputs against explicit criteria. Yet in GRPO-style pipelines, these structured judgments are reduced to a scalar response-level reward and co…
arXiv:2607.24833v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards is a powerful paradigm for eliciting reasoning in large language models, yet it suffers from severe reward sparsity on competition-level mathematics. A common remedy injects atomic know…
arXiv:2607.24996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural networks are hindered by accumulating dormant neurons and loss of expressivity throughout training, particularly in non-stationary data settings, such as continual supervised and reinforcement learning. Recently, neuron res…
arXiv:2508.00344v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable advancements in tackling agent-oriented tasks. Despite their potential, existing work faces challenges when deploying LLMs in agent-based environments. The widely adopted agent …
arXiv:2607.25091v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The alignment of Small Language Models (SLMs) in the 70--500M parameter range using reinforcement learning is often considered unstable, though the underlying failure mechanisms have not been systematically investigated. In the Stat…
arXiv:2607.25369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic systems have rapidly advanced in their ability to interact with real-world environments, leverage external tools, and provide services for users. However, unlike natural-world tasks that assume well-defined instructions, hum…
Deploying learned control policies on low-cost robotic platforms introduces transport latencies and noisy motor feedback that systematically widens the sim-to-real gap. The chasm of simulation to deployment in hardware lies in the delay of the actuator reaching the commanded posi…
Large language model agents often encounter related yet distinct tasks that share reusable solution patterns. Yet standard agentic reinforcement learning treats tasks as independent episodes, while existing approaches to skill learning either focus on repeated attempts of one tas…
Agent harnesses have become the operational infrastructure of modern large language model agents, coordinating context, tools, verification, and execution control to translate latent model capability into reliable long-horizon behavior. However, reliable long-horizon behavior req…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Tianyi Men, Zhuoran Jin, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao·
arXiv:2607.24720v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-turn long-horizon planning is critical for foundation model agents, yet how to fundamentally improve it remains unclear. Existing models are trained on uncontrollable and opaque Internet data, making it difficult to identify…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Xiao Ma, Zhiquan Hu, Yi Wei, Chenchen Zhao, Yijun Chen, Jicheng Zhao, Yuming Li Chuang Dai·
arXiv:2607.23955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning enables Agentic RAG systems to learn multi-turn search from verifiable outcome rewards, but all- zero rollout groups provide no comparative signal and may hide useful search behavior. We present EviBack, an ev…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Kaibing Yang, Guangfeng Cai, Shengtian Yang, Shuo He, Yu Li, Mengyi Liu, Pengwei Chen, Jun Xu, Lei Feng·
arXiv:2607.22724v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Group-based policy optimization has been increasingly used to train large language model (LLM) agents from sparse outcome rewards by comparing trajectories or steps within a group. However, on difficult long-horizon tasks, this co…
arXiv:2607.24062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) training for Large Language Models (LLMs) often suffers from instability due to the discrepancy between training and inference. This training-inference discrepancy stems from two primary factors: an arc…
arXiv:2607.23726v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Exploration in sparse-reward long-horizon tasks poses significant challenges for reinforcement learning. To address these challenges, we propose a two-level Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) framework. The first level hand…
arXiv:2607.24672v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In safety-critical sectors such as robotics and automotive engineering, the deployment of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is often hindered by the black-box nature of deep neural networks. This lack of transparency poses significa…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Michael Girstl, Alexander Mattick, Christopher Mutschler·
arXiv:2607.24057v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-world Reinforcement Learning depends on the ability to formulate safety constraints into a policy. A common way to model such constraints is to introduce an additional cost signal in the Markov Decision Process, which notifies …
arXiv:2607.23263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deciding whether a trajectory actually fulfills its instruction governs how we measure computer-use agents on long-horizon graphical-user-interface tasks and how we train them with reinforcement learning. This judgment has long reli…
Rubric-based reinforcement learning enriches language model training by evaluating model outputs against explicit criteria. Yet in GRPO-style pipelines, these structured judgments are reduced to a scalar response-level reward and converted into a response-level advantage, which i…
Multi-turn long-horizon planning is critical for foundation model agents, yet how to fundamentally improve it remains unclear. Existing models are trained on uncontrollable and opaque Internet data, making it difficult to identify how planning ability is acquired, shaped, and int…
arXiv cs.CL
TIER_1English(EN)·Jian Hu, Huiying Li, Hao Zhang, Binfeng Xu, Yifan Zhang, Shaokun Zhang, Hemil Desai, Michael Demoret, Pavlo Molchanov, Jan Kautz, Yi Dong·
arXiv:2607.21653v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning research is constant algorithm modification, new estimators, new pipeline stages, new rollout schemes, and in mainstream frameworks each change threads through layers of trainer, distributed backend,…
The alignment of Small Language Models (SLMs) in the 70--500M parameter range using reinforcement learning is often considered unstable, though the underlying failure mechanisms have not been systematically investigated. In the State-of-the-Art (SOTA) research, fifteen (model, co…
Multi-turn long-horizon planning is critical for foundation model agents, yet how to fundamentally improve it remains unclear. Existing models are trained on uncontrollable and opaque Internet data, making it difficult to identify how planning ability is acquired, shaped, and int…
Safe quadrotor navigation in cluttered and dynamic environments depends not only on instantaneous geometric perception, but more critically on anticipating collision risks induced by relative motion. Conventional modular pipelines frequently suffer from perception latency, while …
This paper develops an online, off-policy policy-iteration framework for reinforcement learning (RL), based on sparse Gaussian-mixture-model Q-functions (S-GMM-QFs). The framework reconciles streaming, non-stationary data with the Riemannian structure of the parameter space while…
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is the dominant reinforcement learning algorithm for training reasoning capabilities in large language models, notably adopted by DeepSeek-R1. The recent improvement Dr. GRPO (COLM 2025) identifies the response-level length bias caused by…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Manoosh Samiei, Doina Precup, Paul Masset·
arXiv:2607.20656v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective decision-making in complex and changing environments requires balancing short-term and long-term consequences. In reinforcement learning (RL), this trade-off is typically controlled through a fixed discount factor, which…
arXiv:2607.21302v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavior prior reinforcement learning (BPRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm to improve sample efficiency in online reinforcement learning (RL) by leveraging policy priors derived from offline demonstrations. However, most exist…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Yubo Wang, Qiuyu Zhao, Zenghui Sun, Shichao Dong, Jinsong Lan, Xiaoyong Zhu, Haoyang Li, Bo Zheng, Lei Chen·
arXiv:2607.20553v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memory Manager models are pivotal in agent systems. Existing methods rely predominantly on LLM-judged synthetic question-answer (QA) pairs, making memory valuation dependent on sampled queries and the downstream reader. To address t…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Yarden As, Dhruva Tirumala, Ren\'e Zurbr\"ugg, Chenhao Li, Stelian Coros, Andreas Krause, Markus Wulfmeier·
arXiv:2602.20220v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate what specific design choices enable successful online reinforcement learning (RL) on physical robots. Across 100 real-world training runs on three distinct robotic platforms, we systematically ablate algorit…
arXiv:2607.21111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are trained on fixed behavioral trajectories, which makes trajectory-level deletion important when selected data must be removed after training. Evaluating such deletion is difficult beca…
arXiv:2607.19616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge graphs (KGs) are widely used to inject prior knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL), yet the literature is dominated by single-domain, positive-result method papers, so we lack a systematic account of when KG structure…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Siyi Hu, Mohamad A Hady, Jianglin Qiao, Jimmy Cao, Mahardhika Pratama, Ryszard Kowalczyk·
arXiv:2507.10142v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has achieved strong performance in simulated benchmarks, yet real deployments often violate the assumptions under which algorithms are designed and evaluated. Agent populations may chang…
arXiv:2607.19450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large-scale online reinforcement learning (RL) is the predominant means of eliciting advanced abilities including long-term reasoning and agentic tool use in large language models (LLMs). However, continuing to scale it across vas…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Vasos Arnaoutis, Eric Lutters, Bojana Rosi\'c·
arXiv:2607.20010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we present a generalized temporal-difference (TD) reinforcement learning framework based on the theory of conditional expectations. The value and action-value (Q-value) functions are treated as uncertain quantities, a…
In this paper, we present a generalized temporal-difference (TD) reinforcement learning framework based on the theory of conditional expectations. The value and action-value (Q-value) functions are treated as uncertain quantities, and their estimation is formulated as a stochasti…
arXiv:2607.19232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) intends to separate strategic planning from primitive execution. It has been widely successful in solving long-horizon and complex tasks, where flat-RL algorithms have difficulty in learning…
arXiv:2512.18763v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Unlike their conventional use as estimators of probability density functions in reinforcement learning (RL), this paper introduces a novel function-approximation role for Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) as direct surrogates for Q…
arXiv:2607.18722v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning improves throughput by decoupling rollout generation from optimization, but staleness is an inevitable byproduct compounded by policy lag, engine delays, and mixture-of-experts routing. From a t…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Garvit Singla, Uma Maheswari Natarajan, Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi·
arXiv:2607.18830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) is a widely used framework for reinforcement learning (RL) that enables efficient transfer by learning global policy parameters that can be rapidly adapted to new tasks. MAML training proceeds i…
arXiv:2607.18719v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study proposes a learning method for multi-agent systems that allows agents to be controlled through human manager instructions after learning and enables uninstructed agents to implicitly complement the overall work based on…
arXiv:2607.18589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning is conventionally divided into model-based and model-free methods. In this taxonomy, model-based methods perform lookahead planning over a learned world model, whereas model-free methods learn a reactive sta…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Elena Sorina Lupu, Patrick Spieler, Khurram Javed, Kris De Asis, John D. Martin, Martha Steenstrup, Joseph Modayil·
arXiv:2607.18488v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) research has demonstrated success in both physical and simulated domains; however, the predominant methodology remains rooted in simulations. The predominance of simulations makes translating research t…
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. Although Baghchal has a complex structure which is strategic, has perfec…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Ubayd Ali Bapoo, Clement N Nyirenda·
arXiv:2607.19117v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parameterized action reinforcement learning has shown strong performance in environments requiring both discrete action selection and continuous parameterization. Prior work established the effectiveness of single-agent actor-critic…
arXiv:2607.18470v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has shown strong effectiveness in reinforcement learning from verifiable feedback, where sampled rollouts can be compared within a group using task-provided correctness signals. However, e…
arXiv:2607.18689v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) methods for learning-to-rank (LTR) can optimize (almost) any ranking goal, e.g., from precision or discounted cumulative gain to fairness-of-exposure or ranking distillation. However, standard RL is ineff…
arXiv:2607.19044v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Leveraging large language models (LLMs) for molecular generation has shown remarkable potential in chemical and drug design. Current methods primarily rely on supervised training or fine-tuning with limited datasets, which are insuf…
arXiv:2607.18554v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop the Continuous Distributed Coupled Policy Gradient (CDCPG) algorithm for cooperative reinforcement learning in networked Markov decision processes with continuous state and action spaces. Each agent maintains a local ac…
Agentic reinforcement learning research is constant algorithm modification, new estimators, new pipeline stages, new rollout schemes, and in mainstream frameworks each change threads through layers of trainer, distributed backend, and rollout glue: the cost lands on the researche…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) systems face fundamental challenges in balancing global coordination with local execution across different temporal scales. This paper introduces the Coupled Hierarchical Multi-Agent System (CHMAS), a novel framework that decomposes multi…
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) intends to separate strategic planning from primitive execution. It has been widely successful in solving long-horizon and complex tasks, where flat-RL algorithms have difficulty in learning. However, while the low-level agent in HRL bene…
Large-scale online reinforcement learning (RL) is the predominant means of eliciting advanced abilities including long-term reasoning and agentic tool use in large language models (LLMs). However, continuing to scale it across vast task domains of interest remains challenging in …
Asynchronous reinforcement learning improves throughput by decoupling rollout generation from optimization, but staleness is an inevitable byproduct compounded by policy lag, engine delays, and mixture-of-experts routing. From a trust-region perspective, this mismatch is critical…
This study proposes a learning method for multi-agent systems that allows agents to be controlled through human manager instructions after learning and enables uninstructed agents to implicitly complement the overall work based on the actions of other agents. Multi-agent applicat…
Reinforcement learning (RL) methods for learning-to-rank (LTR) can optimize (almost) any ranking goal, e.g., from precision or discounted cumulative gain to fairness-of-exposure or ranking distillation. However, standard RL is ineffective and computationally costly due to the eno…
Reinforcement learning (RL) methods for learning-to-rank (LTR) can optimize (almost) any ranking goal, e.g., from precision or discounted cumulative gain to fairness-of-exposure or ranking distillation. However, standard RL is ineffective and computationally costly due to the eno…
arXiv:2607.17981v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Representation learning has enabled classical exploration strategies to be extended to deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), but often makes algorithms more complex and theoretical guarantees harder to establish. We introduce Random Fea…
arXiv:2607.16210v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly applied in complex, safety-critical domains, yet the lack of rigorous behavioral guarantees for neural network-based policies remains a major barrier to deployment. Recent advances in poli…
arXiv:2607.17560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a framework for sequential decision making under explicit objectives. In its classical form, RL studies how an agent should act to maximise long-term reward in a dynamic environment. In richer se…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Jello Zhou, David J. Schwab, Vudtiwat Ngampruetikorn·
arXiv:2603.16842v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic resetting -- intermittently returning a process to a fixed reference state -- has emerged as an effective mechanism for optimizing first-passage properties. Existing theory largely treats processes that search but do …
arXiv:2510.19244v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (RL) achieves remarkable performance but lacks interpretability, limiting trust in policy behavior. The existing SILVER framework (Li, Siddique, and Cao 2025) explains RL policy via Shapley-based regr…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Adrian P. Pope, Jaime S. Ide, Daria Micovic, Henry Diaz, David Rosenbluth, Lee Ritholtz, Jason C. Twedt, Thayne T. Walker, Kevin Alcedo, Daniel Javorsek·
arXiv:2105.00990v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous control in high-dimensional, continuous state spaces is a persistent and important challenge in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. Because of high risk and complexity, the adoption of AI for autonomou…
arXiv:2607.17760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) provides a powerful framework for learning from demonstrations. However, real-world tasks often exhibit substantial natural variations (e.g., picking up mugs with varying shapes), making it imp…
arXiv cs.AI
TIER_1English(EN)·Chinmay Rane, Kanishka Tyagi, Michael Manry·
arXiv:2607.18163v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: PPO and the GRPO baseline studied here use clipped surrogate objectives whose favorable-direction saturation introduces an abrupt change in the scalar objective's derivative. We ask whether Output Reset (OR), a smooth one-sided sa…
arXiv:2201.05000v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning and, recently, Deep Reinforcement Learning are popular methods for solving sequential decision-making problems modeled as Markov Decision Processes. RL modeling of a problem and selecting algorithms …
arXiv:2508.04225v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Behavior Regularized Policy Optimization (BRPO) leverages asymmetric divergence regularization to mitigate distribution shift in offline reinforcement learning. This paper is the first to study the open question of symmetr…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Hany Hamed, Abhishek Naik, Colin Bellinger, A. Rupam Mahmood·
arXiv:2607.17326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transfer-oriented reinforcement learning requires evaluating algorithms along dimensions that go beyond standard sample efficiency. We focus on two dimensions: practical efficiency, which asks whether conclusions about algorithm sui…
arXiv cs.LG
TIER_1English(EN)·Riccardo Poiani, Martino Bernasconi, Andrea Celli·
arXiv:2607.17823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning is a cornerstone technique for modern large reasoning models. Usually, for difficult tasks such as code generation and theorem proving, the agent is evaluated by generating $K$ responses rather than sampling a…
Asynchronous reinforcement learning improves throughput by decoupling rollout generation from optimization, but staleness is an inevitable byproduct compounded by policy lag, engine delays, and mixture-of-experts routing. From a trust-region perspective, this mismatch is critical…
We develop the Continuous Distributed Coupled Policy Gradient (CDCPG) algorithm for cooperative reinforcement learning in networked Markov decision processes with continuous state and action spaces. Each agent maintains a local actor over a bounded graph neighborhood, and a local…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) provides a powerful framework for learning from demonstrations. However, real-world tasks often exhibit substantial natural variations (e.g., picking up mugs with varying shapes), making it impractical to collect demonstrations that fully spec…
arXiv stat.ML
TIER_1English(EN)·Zijie Cheng, Xiang Li, Yang Peng, Zhihua Zhang·
arXiv:2608.27313v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We establish a global finite-sample guarantee for synchronous quantile temporal-difference learning (QTD) in tabular distributional reinforcement learning. The proof separates two stability mechanisms. A global comparison argument, …
arXiv:2608.26585v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discrete diffusion models have become a strong, widely adopted class of generators for sequence data, and steering them toward a downstream reward at inference time, without any retraining, is increasingly important. Such training…
arXiv stat.ML
TIER_1English(EN)·Lars van der Laan, Nathan Kallus·
arXiv:2608.24858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Marginalized importance weighting evaluates a target policy by reweighting offline state-action samples with its discounted occupancy ratio, characterized by an adjoint Bellman equation. Existing minimax, primal-dual, and fitted f…
arXiv stat.ML
TIER_1English(EN)·Victor Gallego, Roi Naveiro, David Rios Insua, David Gomez-Ullate Oteiza·
arXiv:1908.08773v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In certain reinforcement learning (RL) scenarios there are adversaries trying to interfere with the underlying reward process for their own benefit. We introduce Threatened Markov Decision Processes (TMDPs) as a framework …
arXiv stat.ML
TIER_1English(EN)·Tuoyi Zhao, Chengchun Shi, Zhengling Qi, Lan Wang·
arXiv:2608.22595v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a new framework for flexible, nonlinear, and interpretable off-policy evaluation for infinite-horizon reinforcement learning. To handle large state spaces and support transparent decision-making, we model the Q-function u…
arXiv:2608.20208v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning improves robotic policies using previously collected data without further environment interaction. Yet prevalent diffusion- and flow-matching robot policies lack tractable likelihoods, limiting their u…
arXiv stat.ML
TIER_1English(EN)·Chenyang Zhao, Jiqiang Zhang, Li Chen, Yong Zou·
arXiv:2608.20016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reputation is widely recognized as a key mechanism for sustaining cooperation. However, most existing game-theoretic models treat reputation primarily as an external factor that modulates payoffs, interaction structures, or strate…
arXiv stat.ML
TIER_1English(EN)·Tomasz R. Bielecki, Thibaut Mastrolia, Haoze Yan·
arXiv:2608.19151v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study stochastic control of multivariate Hawkes-driven stochastic differential equations with machine learning algorithms in a non-Markovian setting. Due to the path dependence of the memory of the Hawkes intensity, this proble…
arXiv:2608.17173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online decision making often requires navigating a landscape shaped by both dynamic contexts and strategic interactions. In competitive pricing, for example, hotels must account for both dynamic contextual factors and rivals' strate…
arXiv:2608.14430v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training provides a direct way to align diffusion models with human preferences and task-specific rewards. However, current RL algorithms for diffusion models remain fragmented: reverse-trajectory …
arXiv:2602.23672v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This study proposes a General Bayes framework for policy learning. We consider decision problems in which a decision-maker chooses an action from a given set to maximize expected welfare. Typical examples include treatment choic…
arXiv stat.ML
TIER_1English(EN)·Zijie Cheng, Yang Peng, Zhihua Zhang·
arXiv:2608.12973v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study how to perform statistical inference for quantile temporal difference learning (QTD) in distributional reinforcement learning. Assuming access to a generative model, we first establish functional central limi…
arXiv stat.ML
TIER_1English(EN)·Hua Zheng, Wei Xie, M. Ben Feng, Keilung Choy·
arXiv:2602.05379v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective reinforcement learning (RL) for complex stochastic systems requires leveraging historical data to improve sample efficiency and accelerate policy optimization. However, classical experience replay treats all past obser…
arXiv stat.ML
TIER_1English(EN)·Alireza Mousavi-Hosseini, Murat A. Erdogdu·
arXiv:2603.06957v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study post-training linear autoregressive models with outcome and process rewards. Given a context $\boldsymbol{x}$, the model must predict the response $\boldsymbol{y} \in Y^N$, a sequence of length $N$ that satisfies a $\ga…
arXiv:2608.11052v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover a reward function under which the resulting policy reproduces the behavior observed in expert demonstrations. A natural approach is to formulate IRL as a bilevel optimization pr…
arXiv stat.ML
TIER_1English(EN)·Jianhan Zhang, Jitao Wang, John D. Piette, Donglin Zeng, Chengchun Shi, Zhenke Wu·
arXiv:2608.08743v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to optimize sequential decisions to maximize population-level benefits over time. However, when deployed in high-stakes settings such as healthcare, RL decisions might systematically restrict some s…
arXiv:2605.14599v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We establish novel structural and statistical results for entropy-regularized min-max inverse reinforcement learning (Min-Max-IRL) in finite-horizon MDPs with Borel state and action spaces. We show that maximum likelihood …
arXiv:2608.06276v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Persistence diagrams (PDs) provide stable and interpretable summaries of multiscale topological structure. While substantial progress has been made in the statistical analysis of PDs, existing literature often treats diagrams as sta…
arXiv stat.ML
TIER_1English(EN)·M. Santos-Pascual, D. R\'ios Insua·
arXiv:2606.20880v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decision-making under partial or adversarial observability requires accurate inference of the environment's latent state and its associated uncertainty. This work analyses adversarial attacks on linear state-space models, where …
arXiv stat.ML
TIER_1English(EN)·Luca Viano, Antoine Moulin, Audrey Huang, Volkan Cevher, Philip Amortila, Dylan J. Foster·
arXiv:2607.29617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Imitation learning (IL)---training an agent to replicate expert behavior from demonstrations---underpins applications from robotics to language model training. Standard approaches such as Behavior Cloning (BC) are known to suffer …
arXiv:2511.23310v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective paradigm for post-training large language models, yet the design of its baselines and learning-rate schedules remains largely heuristic. This limi…
arXiv:2607.28408v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This thesis studies policy learning in interactive systems where an agent observes a context, selects an action from a very large set, and receives partial feedback. The main framework is contextual bandits, with two paradigms: on…
arXiv:2607.25241v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically assume that the actions in the dataset are observed without error. However, in many real-world applications, the true actions are unobserved and only noisy proxies ar…
arXiv stat.ML
TIER_1English(EN)·Jia Wan, Sean R. Sinclair, Devavrat Shah, Martin J. Wainwright·
arXiv:2409.14557v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study a structured class of Markov Decision Processes, known as Exo-MDPs, in which the state space is partitioned into exogenous and endogenous components. Exogenous states evolve stochastically, independent of the agent's ac…
arXiv stat.ML
TIER_1English(EN)·Runlong Zhou, Zihan Zhang, Maryam Fazel, Simon S. Du·
arXiv:2607.19854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study horizon-free regret minimization for finite-horizon time-homogeneous tabular Markov decision processes with $S$ states, $A$ actions, horizon $H$, and per-trajectory total reward bounded by $1$. We propose a new algorithm …
arXiv:2607.17201v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work we study the Best Policy Identification (BPI) problem in online, tabular Reinforcement Learning. This is an active sequential hypothesis testing problem in which the learner's objective is to identify an optimal policy …
AWS Machine Learning Blog
TIER_1English(EN)·Maria Masood·
In multi-turn reinforcement learning, your custom reward function decides what the model actually learns. This post shows how to design a composite multi-turn reward for Amazon Nova Forge, execute model-generated code safely inside it, and instrument each component to catch the p…
SkyRL's FP8 reinforcement learning stack — training, rollout, and on-policy weight sync — matches BF16 convergence while cutting step time up to 23% on H100 and B200.
Boost RL training performance with Ray Direct Transport (RDT), enabling fast RDMA-backed weight syncing for LLMs and improving transfer speeds by up to 6x
<p>Agentic RL research is constant algorithm modification, and in mainstream frameworks every change threads through trainer, distributed backend, and rollout glue. NVIDIA's Molt targets that cost with about 8.6K lines of RL code, composing Ray, vLLM, and NeMo AutoModel around on…
<p>Moonshot AI's Kimi team and kvcache-ai open-sourced AgentENV (AENV) under MIT, as part of Kimi K3 Open Day. It runs agent sandboxes as Firecracker microVMs with millisecond snapshot, resume, and 16-way fork, behind an E2B-compatible API.</p> <p>The post <a href="https://www.ma…
The full text of Stefano V. Albrecht, Filippos Christianos, and Lukas Schäfer's book Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Foundations and Modern Approaches is available online for free. Do you want multiple AI agents in competitive play in board games and video games? How about au…
Reinforcement learning cuts AI training power violations 89% An RL controller for GPU power cut violations 89% and boosted energy efficiency 26% in LLM training, then failed at 72B scale before a rebuild fixed it. https://www. notatechguy.com/reinforcement- learning-cuts-ai-train…
<p>Reinforcement learning is what you do when you can score an outcome but cannot demonstrate the behaviour that produces it. Everything else in the field — value functions, policy gradients, PPO — is machinery for turning that score into a gradient.</p> <h2> The definition, and …
<p>Reinforcement learning is the natural formulation for control: there is a state, an action, a dynamics, and something you want maximised over time. It is also, in its model-free form, catastrophically expensive in exactly the currency robots cannot spend.</p> <h2> What RL offe…
Обучение с подкреплением в рекомендациях: оптимизируем удовлетворённость пользователя за всю сессию — статья на KDD 2026 Привет! На связи Артём Матвеев из команды AI VK Research. Мы занимаемся фундаментальными и прикладными исследованиями в области рекомендательных систем, поиска…
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p><strong>TL;DR:</strong> Most RL post-training algorithms optimize the current batch and move on. But after an update, did the new policy actually become better?</p> <p>We introduce <strong>Policy Improvement Reinforcement Learning (PIRL)</strong>…
<p>Been heads-down lately, but I finally had a couple of days to catch up on some recent papers. Sharing one of them here.</p> <p><strong>Milestone-Guided Policy Learning for Long-Horizon Language Agents</strong><br /> Zhejiang University (ZJU-REAL) · <a href="https://arxiv.org/a…
