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 Reinforcement Learning


Co-Alignment: Rethinking Alignment as Bidirectional Human-AI Cognitive Adaptation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Current AI alignment through RLHF follows a single directional paradigm that AI conforms to human preferences while treating human cognition as fixed. We propose a shift to co-alignment through Bidirectional Cognitive Alignment (BiCA), where humans and AI mutually adapt. BiCA uses learnable protocols, representation mapping, and KL-budget constraints for controlled co-evolution. In collaborative navigation, BiCA achieved 85.5% success versus 70.3% baseline, with 230% better mutual adaptation and 332% better protocol convergence. Emergent protocols outperformed handcrafted ones by 84%, while bidirectional adaptation unexpectedly improved safety (+23% out-of-distribution robustness). The 46% synergy improvement demonstrates optimal collaboration exists at the intersection, not union, of human and AI capabilities, validating the shift from single-directional to co-alignment paradigms.


SkillGen: Learning Domain Skills for In-Context Sequential Decision Making

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to sequential decision-making through in-context learning (ICL), yet their effectiveness is highly sensitive to prompt quality. Effective prompts should meet three principles: focus on decision-critical information, provide step-level granularity, and minimize reliance on expert annotations through label efficiency. However, existing ICL methods often fail to satisfy all three criteria simultaneously. Motivated by these challenges, we introduce SkillGen, a skill-based ICL framework for structured sequential reasoning. It constructs an action-centric, domain-level graph from sampled trajectories, identifies high-utility actions via temporal-difference credit assignment, and retrieves step-wise skills to generate fine-grained, context-aware prompts. We further present a theoretical analysis showing that focusing on high-utility segments supports task identifiability and informs more effective ICL prompt design. Experiments on ALFWorld, BabyAI, and ScienceWorld, using both open-source and proprietary LLMs, show that SkillGen achieves consistent gains, improving progress rate by 5.9%-16.5% on average across models.


Agent-R1: Training Powerful LLM Agents with End-to-End Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being explored for building Agents capable of active environmental interaction (e.g., via tool use) to solve complex problems. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is considered a key technology with significant potential for training such Agents; however, the effective application of RL to LLM Agents is still in its nascent stages and faces considerable challenges. Currently, this emerging field lacks in-depth exploration into RL approaches specifically tailored for the LLM Agent context, alongside a scarcity of flexible and easily extensible training frameworks designed for this purpose. To help advance this area, this paper first revisits and clarifies Reinforcement Learning methodologies for LLM Agents by systematically extending the Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework to comprehensively define the key components of an LLM Agent. Secondly, we introduce Agent-R1, a modular, flexible, and user-friendly training framework for RL-based LLM Agents, designed for straightforward adaptation across diverse task scenarios and interactive environments. We conducted experiments on Multihop QA benchmark tasks, providing initial validation for the effectiveness of our proposed methods and framework.


Achieving Safe Control Online through Integration of Harmonic Control Lyapunov-Barrier Functions with Unsafe Object-Centric Action Policies

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Open-world environments pose many challenges for autonomous robots as unexpected events or task modulations can make learned robot behavior inapplicable or obsolete. Consider, for example, a robot that has learned to autonomously perform a sorting task on a table top without any human interventions when a human co-worker steps in to help with finishing the task. This change in task environment now requires the robot to avoid colliding with the human whose arms are extended into the robot's work space and are dynamically changing position. Even if the robot has the perceptual capability to detect and track the human's arms and hands, its trained action policy does not provide a way to account for the motion constraints they impose. Or consider a delivery robot in a warehouse that has an optimized policy for traversing indoor spaces when dynamic constraints are imposed on where it can drive (e.g., because parts of the floor are painted).


Self-Supervised Multisensory Pretraining for Contact-Rich Robot Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Effective contact-rich manipulation requires robots to synergistically leverage vision, force, and proprioception. However, Reinforcement Learning agents struggle to learn in such multisensory settings, especially amidst sensory noise and dynamic changes. We propose MultiSensory Dynamic Pretraining (MSDP), a novel framework for learning expressive multisensory representations tailored for task-oriented policy learning. MSDP is based on masked autoencoding and trains a transformer-based encoder by reconstructing multisensory observations from only a subset of sensor embeddings, leading to cross-modal prediction and sensor fusion. For downstream policy learning, we introduce a novel asymmetric architecture, where a cross-attention mechanism allows the critic to extract dynamic, task-specific features from the frozen embeddings, while the actor receives a stable pooled representation to guide its actions. Our method demonstrates accelerated learning and robust performance under diverse perturbations, including sensor noise, and changes in object dynamics. Evaluations in multiple challenging, contact-rich robot manipulation tasks in simulation and the real world showcase the effectiveness of MSDP. Our approach exhibits strong robustness to perturbations and achieves high success rates on the real robot with as few as 6,000 online interactions, offering a simple yet powerful solution for complex multisensory robotic control.


Parallelizing Tree Search with Twice Sequential Monte Carlo

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods that leverage search are responsible for many milestone breakthroughs in RL. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) recently emerged as an alternative to the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm which drove these breakthroughs. SMC is easier to parallelize and more suitable to GPU acceleration. However, it also suffers from large variance and path degeneracy which prevent it from scaling well with increased search depth, i.e., increased sequential compute. To address these problems, we introduce Twice Sequential Monte Carlo Tree Search (TSMCTS). Across discrete and continuous environments TSMCTS outperforms the SMC baseline as well as a popular modern version of MCTS. Through variance reduction and mitigation of path degeneracy, TSMCTS scales favorably with sequential compute while retaining the properties that make SMC natural to parallelize.


GRPO Privacy Is at Risk: A Membership Inference Attack Against Reinforcement Learning With Verifiable Rewards

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Membership inference attacks (MIAs) on large language models (LLMs) pose significant privacy risks across various stages of model training. Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have brought a profound paradigm shift in LLM training, particularly for complex reasoning tasks. However, the on-policy nature of RLVR introduces a unique privacy leakage pattern: since training relies on self-generated responses without fixed ground-truth outputs, membership inference must now determine whether a given prompt (independent of any specific response) is used during fine-tuning. This creates a threat where leakage arises not from answer memorization. To audit this novel privacy risk, we propose Divergence-in-Behavior Attack (DIBA), the first membership inference framework specifically designed for RLVR. DIBA shifts the focus from memorization to behavioral change, leveraging measurable shifts in model behavior across two axes: advantage-side improvement (e.g., correctness gain) and logit-side divergence (e.g., policy drift). Through comprehensive evaluations, we demonstrate that DIBA significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving around 0.8 AUC and an order-of-magnitude higher TPR@0.1%FPR. We validate DIBA's superiority across multiple settings--including in-distribution, cross-dataset, cross-algorithm, black-box scenarios, and extensions to vision-language models. Furthermore, our attack remains robust under moderate defensive measures. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically analyze privacy vulnerabilities in RLVR, revealing that even in the absence of explicit supervision, training data exposure can be reliably inferred through behavioral traces.


Deep reinforcement learning-based spacecraft attitude control with pointing keep-out constraint

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper implements deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for spacecraft reorientation control with a single pointing keep-out zone. The Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm is adopted to handle continuous state and action space. A new state representation is designed to explicitly include a compact representation of the attitude constraint zone. The reward function is formulated to achieve the control objective while enforcing the attitude constraint. A curriculum learning approach is used for the agent training. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DRL-based method for spacecraft pointing-constrained attitude control.


SocialNav-Map: Dynamic Mapping with Human Trajectory Prediction for Zero-Shot Social Navigation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Social navigation in densely populated dynamic environments poses a significant challenge for autonomous mobile robots, requiring advanced strategies for safe interaction. Existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods require over 2000+ hours of extensive training and often struggle to generalize to unfamiliar environments without additional fine-tuning, limiting their practical application in real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose SocialNav-Map, a novel zero-shot social navigation framework that combines dynamic human trajectory prediction with occupancy mapping, enabling safe and efficient navigation without the need for environment-specific training. Specifically, SocialNav-Map first transforms the task goal position into the constructed map coordinate system. Subsequently, it creates a dynamic occupancy map that incorporates predicted human movements as dynamic obstacles. The framework employs two complementary methods for human trajectory prediction: history prediction and orientation prediction. By integrating these predicted trajectories into the occupancy map, the robot can proactively avoid potential collisions with humans while efficiently navigating to its destination. Extensive experiments on the Social-HM3D and Social-MP3D datasets demonstrate that SocialNav-Map significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) RL-based methods, which require 2,396 GPU hours of training. Notably, it reduces human collision rates by over 10% without necessitating any training in novel environments. By eliminating the need for environment-specific training, SocialNav-Map achieves superior navigation performance, paving the way for the deployment of social navigation systems in real-world environments characterized by diverse human behaviors. The code is available at: https://github.com/linglingxiansen/SocialNav-Map.


Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Zero-Shot Coordination in Evolving Games

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Zero-shot coordination(ZSC), a key challenge in multi-agent game theory, has become a hot topic in reinforcement learning (RL) research recently, especially in complex evolving games. It focuses on the generalization ability of agents, requiring them to coordinate well with collaborators from a diverse, potentially evolving, pool of partners that are not seen before without any fine-tuning. Population-based training, which approximates such an evolving partner pool, has been proven to provide good zero-shot coordination performance; nevertheless, existing methods are limited by computational resources, mainly focusing on optimizing diversity in small populations while neglecting the potential performance gains from scaling population size. To address this issue, this paper proposes the Scalable Population Training (ScaPT), an efficient RL training framework comprising two key components: a meta-agent that efficiently realizes a population by selectively sharing parameters across agents, and a mutual information regularizer that guarantees population diversity. To empirically validate the effectiveness of ScaPT, this paper evaluates it along with representational frameworks in Han-abi cooperative game and confirms its superiority.