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 Reinforcement Learning


Learning to Undo: Rollback-Augmented Reinforcement Learning with Reversibility Signals

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper proposes a reversible learning framework to improve the robustness and efficiency of value based Reinforcement Learning agents, addressing vulnerability to value overestimation and instability in partially irreversible environments. The framework has two complementary core mechanisms: an empirically derived transition reversibility measure called Phi of s and a, and a selective state rollback operation. We introduce an online per state action estimator called Phi that quantifies the likelihood of returning to a prior state within a fixed horizon K. This measure is used to adjust the penalty term during temporal difference updates dynamically, integrating reversibility awareness directly into the value function. The system also includes a selective rollback operator. When an action yields an expected return markedly lower than its instantaneous estimated value and violates a predefined threshold, the agent is penalized and returns to the preceding state rather than progressing. This interrupts sub optimal high risk trajectories and avoids catastrophic steps. By combining reversibility aware evaluation with targeted rollback, the method improves safety, performance, and stability. In the CliffWalking v0 domain, the framework reduced catastrophic falls by over 99.8 percent and yielded a 55 percent increase in mean episode return. In the Taxi v3 domain, it suppressed illegal actions by greater than or equal to 99.9 percent and achieved a 65.7 percent improvement in cumulative reward, while also sharply reducing reward variance in both environments. Ablation studies confirm that the rollback mechanism is the critical component underlying these safety and performance gains, marking a robust step toward safe and reliable sequential decision making.


Restoring Noisy Demonstration for Imitation Learning With Diffusion Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract--Imitation learning (IL) aims to learn a policy from expert demonstrations and has been applied to various applications. By learning from the expert policy, IL methods do not require environmental interactions or reward signals. However, most existing imitation learning algorithms assume perfect expert demonstrations, but expert demonstrations often contain imperfections caused by errors from human experts or sensor/control system inaccuracies. T o address the above problems, this work proposes a filter-and-restore framework to best leverage expert demonstrations with inherent noise. Our proposed method first filters clean samples from the demonstrations and then learns conditional diffusion models to recover the noisy ones. We evaluate our proposed framework and existing methods in various domains, including robot arm manipulation, dexterous manipulation, and locomotion. The experiment results show that our proposed framework consistently outperforms existing methods across all the tasks. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each component and demonstrate the framework's robustness to different noise types and levels. These results confirm the practical applicability of our framework to noisy offline demonstration data. MIT A TION learning [1]-[13] aims to learn a policy from expert demonstrations and has been applied to various applications, including robotics [8], industrial automation, strategy board games, video games, etc [14]-[19]. Compared to reinforcement learning (RL), acquiring a policy in a trial-and-error manner, which can be unsafe or expensive, imitation learning (IL) algorithms can learn without environmental interactions. Furthermore, while designing sophisticated RL reward functions is often difficult and tedious [20], [21], IL methods learn from expert demonstrations and do not require reward signals. Despite the wide applicability, most existing imitation learning algorithms assume perfect (i.e., optimal and clean) expert demonstrations, which can be challenging and expensive to collect. Specifically, expert demonstrations often contain imperfections caused by errors from human experts or sensor and control system inaccuracies.


Hi-Agent: Hierarchical Vision-Language Agents for Mobile Device Control

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Building agents that autonomously operate mobile devices has attracted increasing attention. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show promise, most existing approaches rely on direct state-to-action mappings, which lack structured reasoning and planning, and thus generalize poorly to novel tasks or unseen UI layouts. We introduce Hi-Agent, a trainable hierarchical vision-language agent for mobile control, featuring a high-level reasoning model and a low-level action model that are jointly optimized. For efficient training, we reformulate multi-step decision-making as a sequence of single-step subgoals and propose a foresight advantage function, which leverages execution feedback from the low-level model to guide high-level optimization. This design alleviates the path explosion issue encountered by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in long-horizon tasks and enables stable, critic-free joint training. Hi-Agent achieves a new State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) 87.9% task success rate on the Android-in-the-Wild (AitW) benchmark, significantly outperforming prior methods across three paradigms: prompt-based (AppAgent: 17.7%), supervised (Filtered BC: 54.5%), and reinforcement learning-based (DigiRL: 71.9%). It also demonstrates competitive zero-shot generalization on the ScreenSpot-v2 benchmark. On the more challenging AndroidWorld benchmark, Hi-Agent also scales effectively with larger backbones, showing strong adaptability in high-complexity mobile control scenarios.


Risk-Aware Reinforcement Learning with Bandit-Based Adaptation for Quadrupedal Locomotion

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this work, we study risk-aware reinforcement learning for quadrupedal locomotion. Our approach trains a family of risk-conditioned policies using a Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) constrained policy optimization technique that provides improved stability and sample efficiency. At deployment, we adaptively select the best performing policy from the family of policies using a multi-armed bandit framework that uses only observed episodic returns, without any privileged environment information, and adapts to unknown conditions on the fly. Hence, we train quadrupedal locomotion policies at various levels of robustness using CVaR and adaptively select the desired level of robustness online to ensure performance in unknown environments. We evaluate our method in simulation across eight unseen settings (by changing dynamics, contacts, sensing noise, and terrain) and on a Unitree Go2 robot in previously unseen terrains. Our risk-aware policy attains nearly twice the mean and tail performance in unseen environments compared to other baselines and our bandit-based adaptation selects the best-performing risk-aware policy in unknown terrain within two minutes of operation.


Stop-RAG: Value-Based Retrieval Control for Iterative RAG

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Iterative retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models to answer complex multi-hop questions, but each additional loop increases latency, costs, and the risk of introducing distracting evidence, motivating the need for an efficient stopping strategy. Existing methods either use a predetermined number of iterations or rely on confidence proxies that poorly reflect whether more retrieval will actually help. We cast iterative RAG as a finite-horizon Markov decision process and introduce Stop-RAG, a value-based controller that adaptively decides when to stop retrieving. Trained with full-width forward-view Q($ฮป$) targets from complete trajectories, Stop-RAG learns effective stopping policies while remaining compatible with black-box APIs and existing pipelines. On multi-hop question-answering benchmarks, Stop-RAG consistently outperforms both fixed-iteration baselines and prompting-based stopping with LLMs. These results highlight adaptive stopping as a key missing component in current agentic systems, and demonstrate that value-based control can improve the accuracy of RAG systems.


Reinforcement Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Spatio-Temporal Echocardiography Segmentation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract-- Domain adaptation methods aim to bridge the gap between datasets by enabling knowledge transfer across domains, reducing the need for additional expert annotations. However, many approaches struggle with reliability in the target domain, an issue particularly critical in medical image segmentation, where accuracy and anatomical validity are essential. This challenge is further exacerbated in spatio-temporal data, where the lack of temporal consistency can significantly degrade segmentation quality, and particularly in echocardiography, where the presence of artifacts and noise can further hinder segmentation performance. To address these issues, we present RL4Seg3D, an unsupervised domain adaptation framework for 2D + time echocardiography segmentation. RL4Seg3D integrates novel reward functions and a fusion scheme to enhance key landmark precision in its segmentations while processing full-sized input videos. By leveraging reinforcement learning for image segmentation, our approach improves accuracy, anatomical validity, and temporal consistency while also providing, as a beneficial side effect, a robust uncertainty estimator, which can be used at test time to further enhance segmentation performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on over 30,000 echocardiographic videos, showing that it outperforms standard domain adaptation techniques without the need for any labels on the target domain. Obtaining such annotations is laborious, logistically challenging, and expensive, in particular for 3D images or 2D+t image sequences. This has driven the development of semi-supervised and unsupervised domain adaption methods to leverage larger datasets containing few or no annotations [1]. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers an alternative to conventional supervised training by leveraging automated reward mechanisms to iteratively improve model outputs. We recently proposed a RL-based segmentation strategy (RL4Seg) [2] framing 2D segmentation as a single-timestep RL task, in which a segmentation network acts as an agent, and is optimized through reward-driven interactions with unlabeled data.


Combining Reinforcement Learning and Behavior Trees for NPCs in Video Games with AMD Schola

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

For example, a recent study [1] concludes that NPCs based on behavior trees (BTs) are still more viable than those based on machine learning (ML), calling for new approaches, strategies, and tooling to overcome the barrier to adoption. Additional work has also underscored the need for reusable and adjustable models [2], motivated by game developers' preferences to reuse previously developed assets, provided that reuse does not result in repetitive gameplay. Traditional BT approaches and modern RL techniques each have their respective strengths and limitations in video game development. BTs offer a structured and hierarchical method for managing NPC behaviors, enabling the design of complex systems with predictable outcomes given sufficient development time. However, this complexity can make multi-task BTs less engaging and cumbersome to develop [2]. Conversely, RL provides a dynamic and adaptive approach to decision making [3], allowing developers to guide an agent through trial-and-error. However, training generally-capable RL models remains a challenge, particularly due to reward shaping, negative task transfer [4, 5], and compute resource demands [6].


Optimistic Reinforcement Learning-Based Skill Insertions for Task and Motion Planning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract--T ask and motion planning (T AMP) for robotics manipulation necessitates long-horizon reasoning involving versatile actions and skills. While deterministic actions can be crafted by sampling or optimizing with certain constraints, planning actions with uncertainty, i.e., probabilistic actions, remains a challenge for T AMP . On the contrary, Reinforcement Learning (RL) excels in acquiring versatile, yet short-horizon, manipulation skills that are robust with uncertainties. Besides the policy, a RL skill is defined with data-driven logical components that enable the skill to be deployed by symbolic planning. A plan refinement sub-routine is designed to further tackle the inevitable effect uncertainties. In the experiments, we compare our method with baseline hierarchical planning from both T AMP and RL fields and illustrate the strength of the method. The results show that by embedding RL skills, we extend the capability of T AMP to domains with probabilistic skills, and improve the planning efficiency compared to the previous methods. Reinforcement Learning (RL) empowers robots to acquire manipulation skills without human programming. However, prior works mostly tackle single-skill or short-term manipulation tasks, such as grasping [1] or peg insertion [2] or synergies between two actions [3]. The long-horizon manipulation planning remains a challenge in the RL field because of expanding state/action spaces and sparse rewards etc [4].


A Diffusion-Refined Planner with Reinforcement Learning Priors for Confined-Space Parking

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract--The growing demand for parking has increased the need for automated parking planning methods that can operate reliably in confined spaces. In restricted and complex environments, high-precision maneuvers are required to achieve a high success rate in planning, yet existing approaches often rely on explicit action modeling, which faces challenges when accurately modeling the optimal action distribution. In this paper, we propose DRIP, a diffusion-refined planner anchored in reinforcement learning (RL) prior action distribution, in which an RL-pretrained policy provides prior action distributions to regularize the diffusion training process. By steering the denoising trajectory through the reinforcement learning prior distribution during training, the diffusion model inherits a well-informed initialization, resulting in more accurate action modeling, a higher planning success rate, and reduced inference steps. We evaluate our approach across parking scenarios with varying degrees of spatial constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves planning performance in confined-space parking environments while maintaining strong generalization in common scenarios.


Robust Policy Expansion for Offline-to-Online RL under Diverse Data Corruption

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Pretraining a policy on offline data followed by fine-tuning through online interactions, known as Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning (O2O RL), has emerged as a promising paradigm for real-world RL deployment. However, both offline datasets and online interactions in practical environments are often noisy or even maliciously corrupted, severely degrading the performance of O2O RL. Existing works primarily focus on mitigating the conservatism of offline policies via online exploration, while the robustness of O2O RL under data corruption, including states, actions, rewards, and dynamics, is still unexplored. In this work, we observe that data corruption induces heavy-tailed behavior in the policy, thereby substantially degrading the efficiency of online exploration. To address this issue, we incorporate Inverse Probability Weighted (IPW) into the online exploration policy to alleviate heavy-tailedness, and propose a novel, simple yet effective method termed $\textbf{RPEX}$: $\textbf{R}$obust $\textbf{P}$olicy $\textbf{EX}$pansion. Extensive experimental results on D4RL datasets demonstrate that RPEX achieves SOTA O2O performance across a wide range of data corruption scenarios. Code is available at $\href{https://github.com/felix-thu/RPEX}{https://github.com/felix-thu/RPEX}$.