Reinforcement Learning
LAGEA: Language Guided Embodied Agents for Robotic Manipulation
Chowdhury, Abdul Monaf, Mazumder, Akm Moshiur Rahman, Akter, Rabeya, Arib, Safaeid Hossain
Robotic manipulation benefits from foundation models that describe goals, but today's agents still lack a principled way to learn from their own mistakes. We ask whether natural language can serve as feedback, an error reasoning signal that helps embodied agents diagnose what went wrong and correct course. We introduce LAGEA (Language Guided Embodied Agents), a framework that turns episodic, schema-constrained reflections from a vision language model (VLM) into temporally grounded guidance for reinforcement learning. LAGEA summarizes each attempt in concise language, localizes the decisive moments in the trajectory, aligns feedback with visual state in a shared representation, and converts goal progress and feedback agreement into bounded, step-wise shaping rewardswhose influence is modulated by an adaptive, failure-aware coefficient. This design yields dense signals early when exploration needs direction and gracefully recedes as competence grows. On the Meta-World MT10 embodied manipulation benchmark, LAGEA improves average success over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods by 9.0% on random goals and 5.3% on fixed goals, while converging faster. These results support our hypothesis: language, when structured and grounded in time, is an effective mechanism for teaching robots to self-reflect on mistakes and make better choices. Code will be released soon.
AI-Enhanced Distributed Channel Access for Collision Avoidance in Future Wi-Fi 8
Pan, Jinzhe, Wang, Jingqing, Ouyang, Yuehui, Cheng, Wenchi, Zhang, Wei
The exponential growth of wireless devices and stringent reliability requirements of emerging applications demand fundamental improvements in distributed channel access mechanisms for unlicensed bands. Current Wi-Fi systems, which rely on binary exponential backoff (BEB), suffer from suboptimal collision resolution in dense deployments and persistent fairness challenges due to inherent randomness. This paper introduces a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that integrates artificial intelligence (AI) optimization with legacy device coexistence. We first develop a dynamic backoff selection mechanism that adapts to real-time channel conditions through access deferral events while maintaining full compatibility with conventional CSMA/CA operations. Second, we introduce a fairness quantification metric aligned with enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) principles to ensure equitable medium access opportunities. Finally, we propose a centralized training decentralized execution (CTDE) architecture incorporating neighborhood activity patterns as observational inputs, optimized via constrained multi-agent proximal policy optimization (MAPPO) to jointly minimize collisions and guarantee fairness. Experimental results demonstrate that our solution significantly reduces collision probability compared to conventional BEB while preserving backward compatibility with commercial Wi-Fi devices. The proposed fairness metric effectively eliminates starvation risks in heterogeneous scenarios.
Unleashing Flow Policies with Distributional Critics
Chen, Deshu, Liu, Yuchen, Zhou, Zhijian, Qu, Chao, Qi, Yuan
Flow-based policies have recently emerged as a powerful tool in offline and offline-to-online reinforcement learning, capable of modeling the complex, mul-timodal behaviors found in pre-collected datasets. However, the full potential of these expressive actors is often bottlenecked by their critics, which typically learn a single, scalar estimate of the expected return. To address this limitation, we introduce the Distributional Flow Critic (DFC), a novel critic architecture that learns the complete state-action return distribution. Instead of regressing to a single value, DFC employs flow matching to model the distribution of return as a continuous, flexible transformation from a simple base distribution to the complex target distribution of returns. By doing so, DFC provides the expressive flow-based policy with a rich, distributional Bellman target, which offers a more stable and informative learning signal. Extensive experiments across D4RL and OG-Bench benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves strong performance, especially on tasks requiring multimodal action distributions, and excels in both offline and offline-to-online fine-tuning compared to existing methods. In modern reinforcement learning, particularly in offline and offline-to-online settings, a central challenge is learning effective policies from complex, pre-collected datasets (Fujimoto & Gu, 2021; Tarasov et al., 2023b; Park et al., 2025b). To this end, flow-based policies, trained with generative techniques like flow matching, represent a significant advance (Lipman et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2025).
Critique-Coder: Enhancing Coder Models by Critique Reinforcement Learning
Ruan, Chi, Jiang, Dongfu, Wang, Yubo, Chen, Wenhu
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a popular training paradigm, particularly when paired with reasoning models. While effective, it primarily focuses on generating responses and lacks mechanisms to explicitly foster critique or reflection. Several recent studies, like Critique-Fine-Tuning (CFT) and Critique-Guided-Distillation (CGD) have shown the benefits of explicitly teaching LLMs how to critique. Motivated by them, we propose Critique Reinforcement Learning (CRL), where the model is tasked with generating a critique for a given (question, solution) pair. The reward is determined solely by whether the final judgment label $c \in \{\texttt{True}, \texttt{False}\}$ of the generated critique aligns with the ground-truth judgment $c^*$. Building on this point, we introduce \textsc{Critique-Coder}, which is trained on a hybrid of RL and CRL by substituting 20\% of the standard RL data with CRL data. We fine-tune multiple models (\textsc{Critique-Coder}) and evaluate them on different benchmarks to show their advantages over RL-only models. We show that \textsc{Critique-Coder} consistently outperforms RL-only baselines on all the evaluated benchmarks. Notably, our \textsc{Critique-Coder-8B} can reach over 60\% on LiveCodeBench (v5), outperforming other reasoning models like DeepCoder-14B and GPT-o1. Beyond code generation, \textsc{Critique-Coder} also demonstrates enhanced general reasoning abilities, as evidenced by its better performance on logic reasoning tasks from the BBEH dataset. This indicates that the application of CRL on coding datasets enhances general reasoning and critique abilities, which are transferable across a broad range of tasks. Hence, we believe that CRL works as a great complement to standard RL for LLM reasoning.
MARG: MAstering Risky Gap Terrains for Legged Robots with Elevation Mapping
Dong, Yinzhao, Ma, Ji, Zhao, Liu, Li, Wanyue, Lu, Peng
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) controllers for quadrupedal locomotion have demonstrated impressive performance on challenging terrains, allowing robots to execute complex skills such as climbing, running, and jumping. However, existing blind locomotion controllers often struggle to ensure safety and efficient traversal through risky gap terrains, which are typically highly complex, requiring robots to perceive terrain information and select appropriate footholds during locomotion accurately. Meanwhile, existing perception-based controllers still present several practical limitations, including a complex multi-sensor deployment system and expensive computing resource requirements. This paper proposes a DRL controller named MAstering Risky Gap Terrains (MARG), which integrates terrain maps and proprioception to dynamically adjust the action and enhance the robot's stability in these tasks. During the training phase, our controller accelerates policy optimization by selectively incorporating privileged information (e.g., center of mass, friction coefficients) that are available in simulation but unmeasurable directly in real-world deployments due to sensor limitations. We also designed three foot-related rewards to encourage the robot to explore safe footholds. More importantly, a terrain map generation (TMG) model is proposed to reduce the drift existing in mapping and provide accurate terrain maps using only one LiDAR, providing a foundation for zero-shot transfer of the learned policy. The experimental results indicate that MARG maintains stability in various risky terrain tasks.
APRIL: Active Partial Rollouts in Reinforcement Learning to Tame Long-tail Generation
Zhou, Yuzhen, Li, Jiajun, Su, Yusheng, Ramesh, Gowtham, Zhu, Zilin, Long, Xiang, Zhao, Chenyang, Pan, Jin, Yu, Xiaodong, Wang, Ze, Du, Kangrui, Wu, Jialian, Sun, Ximeng, Liu, Jiang, Yu, Qiaolin, Chen, Hao, Liu, Zicheng, Barsoum, Emad
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone in advancing large-scale pre-trained language models (LLMs). Successive generations, including GPT-o series, DeepSeek-R1, Kimi-K1.5, Grok 4, and GLM-4.5, have relied on large-scale RL training to enhance reasoning and coding capabilities. To meet the community's growing RL needs, numerous RL frameworks have been proposed. However, RL training remains computationally expensive, with rollout generation accounting for more than 90% of total runtime. In addition, its efficiency is often constrained by the long-tail distribution of rollout response lengths, where a few lengthy responses stall entire batches, leaving GPUs idle and underutilized. As model and rollout sizes continue to grow, this bottleneck increasingly limits scalability. To address this challenge, we propose Active Partial Rollouts in Reinforcement Learning (APRIL), which mitigates long-tail inefficiency. In the rollout phase, APRIL over-provisions rollout requests, terminates once the target number of responses is reached, and recycles incomplete responses for continuation in future steps. This strategy ensures that no rollouts are discarded while substantially reducing GPU idle time. Experiments show that APRIL improves rollout throughput by 22.5% on average (at most 44%) across commonly used RL algorithms (GRPO, DAPO, GSPO), accelerates convergence, and achieves 2.1% on average(at most 8%) higher final accuracy across tasks. Moreover, APRIL is both framework and hardware agnostic, already integrated into the slime RL framework, and deployable on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs alike. Taken together, this work unifies system-level and algorithmic considerations in proposing APRIL, with the aim of advancing RL training efficiency and inspiring further optimizations in RL systems. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/RLsys-Foundation/APRIL
Imagined Autocurricula
Güzel, Ahmet H., Jackson, Matthew Thomas, Liesen, Jarek Luca, Rocktäschel, Tim, Foerster, Jakob Nicolaus, Bogunovic, Ilija, Parker-Holder, Jack
Training agents to act in embodied environments typically requires vast training data or access to accurate simulation, neither of which exists for many cases in the real world. Instead, world models are emerging as an alternative leveraging offline, passively collected data, they make it possible to generate diverse worlds for training agents in simulation. In this work, we harness world models to generate imagined environments to train robust agents capable of generalizing to novel task variations. One of the challenges in doing this is ensuring the agent trains on useful generated data. We thus propose a novel approach, IMAC (Imagined Autocurricula), leveraging Unsupervised Environment Design (UED), which induces an automatic curriculum over generated worlds. In a series of challenging, procedurally generated environments, we show it is possible to achieve strong transfer performance on held-out environments, having trained only inside a world model learned from a narrower dataset. We believe this opens the path to utilizing larger-scale, foundation world models for generally capable agents.
Agentic DDQN-Based Scheduling for Licensed and Unlicensed Band Allocation in Sidelink Networks
Chou, Po-Heng, Fu, Pin-Qi, Saad, Walid, Wang, Li-Chun
Abstract--In this paper, we present an agentic double deep Q-network (DDQN) scheduler for licensed/unlicensed band a l-location in New Radio (NR) sidelink (SL) networks. Beyond conventional reward-seeking reinforcement learning (RL), the agent perceives and reasons over a multi-dimensional conte xt that jointly captures queueing delay, link quality, coexistenc e intensity, and switching stability. A capacity-aware, quality of serv ice (QoS)- constrained reward aligns the agent with goal-oriented sch eduling rather than static thresholding. Under constrained bandwi dth, the proposed design reduces blocking by up to 87.5% versus thres hold policies while preserving throughput, highlighting the va lue of context-driven decisions in coexistence-limited NR SL net works. The proposed scheduler is an embodied agent (E-agent) tailo red for task-specific, resource-efficient operation at the netw ork edge.
Double Check My Desired Return: Transformer with Target Alignment for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Pei, Yue, Zhang, Hongming, Gao, Chao, Müller, Martin, Zhu, Mengxiao, Sheng, Hao, Chen, Ziliang, Lin, Liang, Zhu, Haogang
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved significant advances in domains such as robotic control, autonomous driving, and medical decision-making. Most existing methods primarily focus on training policies that maximize cumulative returns from a given dataset. However, many real-world applications require precise control over policy performance levels, rather than simply pursuing the best possible return. Reinforcement learning via supervised learning (RvS) frames offline RL as a sequence modeling task, enabling the extraction of diverse policies by conditioning on different desired returns. Yet, existing RvS-based transformers, such as Decision Transformer (DT), struggle to reliably align the actual achieved returns with specified target returns, especially when interpolating within underrepresented returns or extrapolating beyond the dataset. To address this limitation, we propose Doctor, a novel approach that Double Checks the Transformer with target alignment for Offline RL. Doctor integrates the strengths of supervised learning (SL) and temporal difference (TD) learning by jointly optimizing the action prediction and value estimation. During inference, Doctor introduces a double-check mechanism: actions are first sampled around the desired target returns and then validated with value functions. This ensures more accurate alignment between predicted actions and desired target returns. We evaluate Doctor on the D4RL and EpiCare benchmarks, demonstrating aligned control yields stronger performance and tunable expertise, showing its effectiveness in a wide range of tasks.
Moving Out: Physically-grounded Human-AI Collaboration
Kang, Xuhui, Lee, Sung-Wook, Liu, Haolin, Wang, Yuyan, Kuo, Yen-Ling
The ability to adapt to physical actions and constraints in an environment is crucial for embodied agents (e.g., robots) to effectively collaborate with humans. Such physically grounded human-AI collaboration must account for the increased complexity of the continuous state-action space and constrained dynamics caused by physical constraints. In this paper, we introduce Moving Out, a new human-AI collaboration benchmark that resembles a wide range of collaboration modes affected by physical attributes and constraints, such as moving heavy items together and maintaining consistent actions to move a big item around a corner. Using Moving Out, we designed two tasks and collected human-human interaction data to evaluate models' abilities to adapt to diverse human behaviors and unseen physical attributes. To address the challenges in physical environments, we propose a novel method, BASS (Behavior Augmentation, Simulation, and Selection), to enhance the diversity of agents and their understanding of the outcome of actions. Our experiments show that BASS outperforms state-of-the-art models in AI-AI and human-AI collaboration. The project page is available at https://live-robotics-uva.github.io/movingout_ai/.