cs.LGApr 21, 2026

Low-Rank Adaptation for Critic Learning in Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Yuan ZhuangYuexin BianSihong HeJie FengQing SuSongyang HanJonathan PetitShihao Ji+2 more

Organizations: University of Connecticut · University of California San Diego · University of Texas at Arlington · Qualcomm

Abstract

Scaling critic capacity is a promising direction for improving off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). However, recent work shows that larger critics are prone to overfitting and instability in replay-based bootstrapped training. In this paper, we propose using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) as a structural regularizer for critic learning. Our approach freezes randomly initialized base matrices and optimizes only the corresponding low-rank adapters, thereby constraining critic updates to a low-dimensional subspace. We evaluate our method across different off-policy RL algorithms, including SAC and FastTD3 based on different network architectures. Empirically, LoRA efficiently reduces critic loss during training and improves overall policy performance, achieving the best or competitive results on most tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our low-rank updates provide a simple and effective form of structural regularization for critic learning in off-policy RL.

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