In value-based deep reinforcement learning with replay memories, the batch size parameter specifies how many transitions to sample for each gradient update. Although critical to the learning process, this value is typically not adjusted when proposing new algorithms. In this work we present a broad empirical study that suggests reducing the batch size can result in a number of significant performance gains; this is surprising, as the general tendency when training neural networks is towards larger batch sizes for improved performance. We complement our experimental findings with a set of empirical analyses towards better understanding this phenomenon.

Decision Transformers have recently emerged as a new and compelling paradigm for offline Reinforcement Learning (RL), completing a trajectory in an autoregressive way. While improvements have been made to overcome initial shortcomings, online finetuning of decision transformers has been surprisingly under-explored. The widely adopted state-of-the-art Online Decision Transformer (ODT) still struggles when pretrained with low-reward offline data. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the online-finetuning of the decision transformer, showing that the commonly used Return-To-Go (RTG) that's far from the expected return hampers the online fine-tuning process. This problem, however, is well-addressed by the value function and advantage of standard RL algorithms. As suggested by our analysis, in our experiments, we hence find that simply adding TD3 gradients to the finetuning process of ODT effectively improves the online finetuning performance of ODT, especially if ODT is pretrained with low-reward offline data. These findings provide new directions to further improve decision transformers.

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically parameterize the policy as a deep network that outputs either a deterministic action or a stochastic one modeled as a Gaussian distribution, hence restricting learning to a single behavioral mode. Meanwhile, diffusion models emerged as a powerful framework for multimodal learning. However, the use of diffusion policies in online RL is hindered by the intractability of policy likelihood approximation, as well as the greedy objective of RL methods that can easily skew the policy to a single mode. This paper presents Deep Diffusion Policy Gradient (DDiffPG), a novel actor-critic algorithm that learns from scratch multimodal policies parameterized as diffusion models while discovering and maintaining versatile behaviors. DDiffPG explores and discovers multiple modes through off-the-shelf unsupervised clustering combined with novelty-based intrinsic motivation. DDiffPG forms a multimodal training batch and utilizes mode-specific Q-learning to mitigate the inherent greediness of the RL objective, ensuring the improvement of the diffusion policy across all modes. Our approach further allows the policy to be conditioned on mode-specific embeddings to explicitly control the learned modes. Empirical studies validate DDiffPG's capability to master multimodal behaviors in complex, high-dimensional continuous control tasks with sparse rewards, also showcasing proof-of-concept dynamic online replanning when navigating mazes with unseen obstacles.

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning motivates agents to explore states and actions to maximize the entropy of some distribution, typically by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to that entropy function. In this paper, we study intrinsic rewards proportional to the entropy of the discounted distribution of state-action features visited during future time steps. This approach is motivated by two results. First, we show that the expected sum of these intrinsic rewards is a lower bound on the entropy of the discounted distribution of state-action features visited in trajectories starting from the initial states, which we relate to an alternative maximum entropy objective. Second, we show that the distribution used in the intrinsic reward definition is the fixed point of a contraction operator and can therefore be estimated off-policy. Experiments highlight that the new objective leads to improved visitation of features within individual trajectories, in exchange for slightly reduced visitation of features in expectation over different trajectories, as suggested by the lower bound. It also leads to improved convergence speed for learning exploration-only agents. Control performance remains similar across most methods on the considered benchmarks.

Chain-of-thought reasoning, where language models expend additional computation by producing thinking tokens prior to final responses, has driven significant advances in model capabilities. However, training these reasoning models is extremely costly in terms of both data and compute, as it involves collecting long traces of reasoning behavior from humans or synthetic generators and further post-training the model via reinforcement learning. Are these costs fundamental, or can they be reduced through better algorithmic design? We show that autocurriculum, where the model uses its own performance to decide which problems to focus training on, provably improves upon standard training recipes for both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). For SFT, we show that autocurriculum requires exponentially fewer reasoning demonstrations than non-adaptive fine-tuning, by focusing teacher supervision on prompts where the current model struggles. For RL fine-tuning, autocurriculum decouples the computational cost from the quality of the reference model, reducing the latter to a burn-in cost that is nearly independent of the target accuracy. These improvements arise purely from adaptive data selection, drawing on classical techniques from boosting and learning from counterexamples, and requiring no assumption on the distribution or difficulty of prompts.

In this work, we study the dormant neuron phenomenon in multi-agent reinforcement learning value factorization, where the mixing network suffers from reduced network expressivity caused by an increasing number of inactive neurons. We demonstrate the presence of the dormant neuron phenomenon across multiple environments and algorithms, and show that this phenomenon negatively affects the learning process. We show that dormant neurons correlates with the existence of over-active neurons, which have large activation scores. To address the dormant neuron issue, we propose ReBorn, a simple but effective method that transfers the weights from over-active neurons to dormant neurons. We theoretically show that this method can ensure the learned action preferences are not forgotten after the weight-transferring procedure, which increases learning effectiveness. Our extensive experiments reveal that ReBorn achieves promising results across various environments and improves the performance of multiple popular value factorization approaches.

Robust reinforcement learning is essential for deploying reinforcement learning algorithms in real-world scenarios where environmental uncertainty predominates.Traditional robust reinforcement learning often depends on rectangularity assumptions, where adverse probability measures of outcome states are assumed to be independent across different states and actions. This assumption, rarely fulfilled in practice, leads to overly conservative policies. To address this problem, we introduce a new time-constrained robust MDP (TC-RMDP) formulation that considers multifactorial, correlated, and time-dependent disturbances, thus more accurately reflecting real-world dynamics. This formulation goes beyond the conventional rectangularity paradigm, offering new perspectives and expanding the analytical framework for robust RL.We propose three distinct algorithms, each using varying levels of environmental information, and evaluate them extensively on continuous control benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that these algorithms yield an efficient tradeoff between performance and robustness, outperforming traditional deep robust RL methods in time-constrained environments while preserving robustness in classical benchmarks.This study revisits the prevailing assumptions in robust RL and opens new avenues for developing more practical and realistic RL applications.

While the conditional sequence modeling with the transformer architecture has demonstrated its effectiveness in dealing with offline reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, it is struggle to handle out-of-distribution states and actions.Existing work attempts to address this issue by data augmentation with the learned policy or adding extra constraints with the value-based RL algorithm. However, these studies still fail to overcome the following challenges: (1) insufficiently utilizing the historical temporal information among inter-steps, (2) overlooking the local intra-step relationships among return-to-gos (RTGs), states, and actions, (3) overfitting suboptimal trajectories with noisy labels. To address these challenges, we propose $\textbf{D}$ecision $\textbf{M}$amba ($\textbf{DM}$), a novel multi-grained state space model (SSM) with a self-evolving policy learning strategy.DM explicitly models the historical hidden state to extract the temporal information by using the mamba architecture. To capture the relationship among RTG-state-action triplets, a fine-grained SSM module is designed and integrated into the original coarse-grained SSM in mamba, resulting in a novel mamba architecture tailored for offline RL. Finally, to mitigate the overfitting issue on noisy trajectories, a self-evolving policy is proposed by using progressive regularization. The policy evolves by using its own past knowledge to refine the suboptimal actions, thus enhancing its robustness on noisy demonstrations. Extensive experiments on various tasks show that DM outperforms other baselines substantially.

In this paper, we study the non-asymptotic sample complexity for the pure exploration problem in contextual bandits and tabular reinforcement learning (RL): identifying an $\epsilon$-optimal policy from a set of policies $\Pi$ with high probability. Existing work in bandits has shown that it is possible to identify the best policy by estimating only the *difference* between the behaviors of individual policies-which can have substantially lower variance than estimating the behavior of each policy directly--yet the best-known complexities in RL fail to take advantage of this, and instead estimate the behavior of each policy directly. Does it suffice to estimate only the differences in the behaviors of policies in RL? We answer this question positively for contextual bandits, but in the negative for tabular RL, showing a separation between contextual bandits and RL. However, inspired by this, we show that it *almost* suffices to estimate only the differences in RL: if we can estimate the behavior of a *single* reference policy, it suffices to only estimate how any other policy deviates from this reference policy. We develop an algorithm which instantiates this principle and obtains, to the best of our knowledge, the tightest known bound on the sample complexity of tabular RL.

The success of reinforcement learning in a variety of challenging sequential decision-making problems has been much discussed, but often ignored in this discussion is the consideration of how the choice of reward function affects the behavior of these algorithms. Most practical RL algorithms require copious amounts of reward engineering in order to successfully solve challenging tasks. The idea of this type of ``reward-shaping'' has been often discussed in the literature and is used in practical instantiations, but there is relatively little formal characterization of how the choice of reward shaping can yield benefits in sample complexity for RL problems. In this work, we build on the framework of novelty-based exploration to provide a simple scheme for incorporating shaped rewards into RL along with an analysis tool to show that particular choices of reward shaping provably improve sample efficiency. We characterize the class of problems where these gains are expected to be significant and show how this can be connected to practical algorithms in the literature. We show that these results hold in practice in experimental evaluations as well, providing an insight into the mechanisms through which reward shaping can significantly improve the complexity of reinforcement learning while retaining asymptotic performance.