Offline RL

RL: Reinforcement Learning

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29 papers in the last four weeks, up 222% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 189

Jun 11, 2026cs.AI

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning from Delayed Marketplace Feedback for Objective-Weight Adaptation in Three-Sided Dispatch

Dispatch in three-sided marketplaces provides a natural setting for reinforcement learning from world feedback: decisions are evaluated by delayed operational outcomes such as delivery speed, courier utilization, and merchant congestion. We present a deployed reinforcement learning system at DoorDash that adapts dispatch objective weights in a large-scale food-delivery marketplace using delayed signals. Rather than replacing the combinatorial assignment optimizer, a store-level policy learned from logged marketplace data selects a discrete multiplier that shifts the dispatch optimizer's tradeoff between delivery quality and batching efficiency. This interface enables offline policy learning under noisy, delayed, and coupled feedback while preserving production feasibility constraints and operational safeguards. We train a shared value function using centralized offline data and decentralized store-level execution, with Double Q-learning targets and a conservative regularizer to reduce out-of-distribution value overestimation. In a production switchback experiment, the offline-trained policy increases batching and reduces courier-side time costs without degrading customer-facing delivery quality. Results illustrate how world feedback from a live economic and logistics system can be used to safely adapt decision policies online.
Jun 10, 2026cs.LG

Individual Control Barrier Functions-Guided Diffusion Model for Safe Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Offline reinforcement learning allows control policies to be learned directly from data without online interaction, making it suitable for safety-critical tasks. Recent studies have applied diffusion models to offline reinforcement learning to leverage their strong capacity for modeling complex data distributions. However, existing approaches primarily focus on single-agent settings, leaving the safety challenges in multi-agent environments largely unexplored. In this work, we propose a safe offline multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm that embeds neural individual control barrier functions into the diffusion model to enhance safety during trajectory generation, with control policies recovered through inverse dynamics. We evaluate our algorithm across diverse benchmarks, demonstrating substantial safety improvements while maintaining competitive rewards.
Jun 9, 2026cs.LG

Test-Time Gradient Guidance of Flow Policies in Reinforcement Learning

Expressive continuous control policies, such as diffusion and flow models, form the backbone of recent advances in scaling imitation learning for simulated and real robot control. While they are known to scale stably in the supervised imitation learning setting, incorporating them into reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines for policy improvement has proven more difficult. It often requires specialized training objectives or backpropagating through denoising processes, which cause well-known issues with stability and affect scalability. In this paper we study the question of whether simple policy improvement schemes at test time alone, leaving stable supervised policy training intact, can be a competitive alternative which sidesteps these issues. To this end, we propose QGF (Q-Guided Flow), an RL algorithm that performs policy optimization entirely at test time. QGF works by pre-training both a reference flow policy (via a standard behavioral cloning objective) and a value function critic and, at test time, using the value gradient to guide the reference policy to generate higher-value actions without any additional policy learning. Empirically, QGF outperforms prior test-time RL methods on single-task and goal-conditioned offline RL benchmarks with high-dimensional action spaces, and is competitive with state-of-the-art training-time algorithms while being much cheaper to run. Moreover, it exhibits favorable scaling with model size by avoiding the instability of actor-critic training, offering a practical and effective alternative RL algorithm with expressive policies.
Jun 9, 2026cs.LG

Fast and Highly Expressive Policy Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning via Bootstrapped Flow Q-Learning

Diffusion-based Q-learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for offline reinforcement learning, but its reliance on multi-step denoising makes both training and inference computationally expensive and brittle. Recent efforts to accelerate diffusion Q-learning toward single-step action generation typically introduce auxiliary networks, policy distillation, or multi-phase training, which frequently compromise simplicity, stability, or performance. To address these limitations, we introduce Bootstrapped Flow Q-Learning (BFQ), a novel framework that enables accurate single-step action generation during both training and inference, without auxiliary networks or distillation procedures. BFQ adopts a divide-and-conquer view of the displacement vector along the flow path: it begins by learning short-range displacements that can be accurately estimated from the Flow Matching marginal velocity, and bootstraps these components to directly learn a noise-to-action mapping in a single step. This formulation eliminates multi-step denoising, resulting in a learning procedure that is substantially faster, simpler, and more robust. Extensive D4RL evaluations show that BFQ improves performance while significantly reducing computational cost compared to multi-step diffusion baselines, demonstrating that single-step action generation suffices for high-performance offline Reinforcement Learning.
Jun 8, 2026cs.LG

Safe-RULE: Safe Reinforcement UnLEarning

Offline safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) enables policy learning without online interactions, making it suitable for safety-critical systems such as robotics systems. However, its reliance on static datasets exposes offline Safe RL to data poisoning attacks, where adversaries inject malicious samples that compromise safety and induce unsafe policy behavior. In this work, we propose a new learning paradigm, named safe reinforcement unlearning (Safe-RULE), used as a defense framework to remove the influence of poisoned data without retraining from scratch or requiring access to the original training environment. We further extend reinforcement unlearning to offline Safe RL by explicitly accounting for both task performance and safety constraints during the unlearning process. Experiments across benchmark Safe RL tasks demonstrate that our approach effectively enhances safety performance against data poisoning attacks.
Jun 8, 2026cs.RO

Goal Sets, Not Goal States: Queryable Robot Goals through Goal-Set Hindsight Relabeling

Hindsight relabeling usually turns achieved future states into exact goals, which can overconstrain offline robot learning when task success depends only on a subset of the state. We propose Goal-Set Hindsight Relabeling (GS-HER), a predicate-level generalization of HER in which achieved states certify query-defined goal sets rather than singleton goal states. A binary query specifies which variables define success, making the goal predicate an inference-time input while leaving the underlying offline GCRL algorithm unchanged. Across OGBench tasks and five offline goal-conditioned learners, GS-HER improves performance when full-state goals are bottlenecked by nuisance dimensions and turns hindsight relabeling into a reusable goal interface: one checkpoint can answer multiple robot goal predicates without retraining.
Jun 8, 2026cs.LG

Counterfactual Transport Flows for Offline Conservative Trajectory Refinement

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers a path to policy improvement from logged data alone, using historical returns or other measurable outcomes as world feedback. A key difficulty is improving observed behavior without extrapolating beyond what the offline data supports. We propose \emph{counterfactual transport flows}, a source-conditioned trajectory refinement framework for offline decision-making guided by world feedback. Given a low-feedback candidate trajectory, we construct local preference pairs from offline data by retrieving nearby trajectories in latent trajectory space with higher task-specific feedback, and use them as weak supervision for conservative refinement. The framework learns instance-specific refinement directions: at inference time, a refinement strength parameter controls how far the candidate trajectory is transported, enabling a trade-off between preserving the original behavior and applying stronger improvement. Experiments on D4RL benchmarks, including AntMaze and MuJoCo tasks, show that our method improves behavior from historical returns as world feedback, while providing interpretable trajectory-level refinement paths.
Jun 6, 2026cs.AI

Neuro-Symbolic Injection of LTLf Constraints in Autoregressive Reinforcement Learning Policies

In this work we study offline reinforcement learning (RL) under temporally extended task constraints expressed in Linear Temporal Logic over finite traces (LTLf). Recently, transformer-based approaches such as Trajectory Transformers and Decision Transformers have been adopted to address RL as a sequence modeling problem. However, these methods optimize purely for reward and do not account for high-level temporal requirements. Here, we introduce a neurosymbolic framework that injects LTLf background knowledge into such transformer-based RL policies. Our approach compiles LTLf formulas into deterministic finite automata (DFAs) and integrates them into the learning process through a differentiable representation and a logic-based loss function. In particular, we derive differentiable satisfaction signals from DFA progression and use them as a regularization term during training. The resulting method is architecture-agnostic across different models. We evaluate the proposed framework on navigation environments with specification suites covering combinations of safety and reachability temporal properties. Experimental results show that incorporating background knowledge not only improves constraint satisfaction, but also maintains competitive return compared to vanilla baselines.
Jun 3, 2026cs.RO

FlowPRO: Reward-Free Reinforced Fine-Tuning of Flow-Matching VLAs via Proximalized Preference Optimization

Post-training Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models into policies that can be reliably deployed on real robots remains a major bottleneck. SFT and DAgger exploit failure signals only indirectly, and reward-based RL is bottlenecked by the difficulty of real-world reward design and of training reliable critics. We present FlowPRO, a reward-free offline reinforced fine-tuning framework for flow-matching VLAs. Algorithmically, we propose RPRO (Robotic Flow-matching Proximalized Preference Optimization), a preference-optimization objective tailored to the flow-matching action head of VLA models. RPRO pairs a contrastive optimizer with an explicit proximal regularizer that anchors the absolute magnitude of the implicit reward, thereby eliminating the reward-hacking failure mode of plain Flow-DPO. On the data side, a teleoperated intervention-and-rollback paradigm produces naturally paired positive and negative trajectories (τw,τl)(τ^w, τ^l) on a real robot from a single operator action; a Smooth Interpolation procedure, combined with batch mixing, then converts these sparse corrections into dense per-state supervision while preserving the base policy's capabilities. On four long-horizon bimanual tasks, FlowPRO attains the highest success rate, outperforming four representative baselines, and ablations confirm the contribution of each loss component.
Jun 3, 2026cs.NI

Generalizable Multi-Task Learning for Wireless Networks Using Prompt Decision Transformers

Future wireless networks demand rapid adaptation to highly heterogeneous environments and dynamic task configurations, necessitating a shift from conventional rule-based and optimization-driven radio resource management (RRM) toward artificial intelligence (AI)-driven RRM. AI-driven approaches can learn complex nonlinear relationships, generalize across diverse network conditions and enable real-time, scalable and autonomous decision-making. Among RRM techniques, coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission is pivotal for mitigating inter-cell interference and enhancing cell-edge performance, thereby improving quality of experience (QoE) in dense deployments. However, optimal multi-cell selection remains a complex combinatorial challenge as it requires jointly optimizing over many possible serving-cell combinations under dynamic traffic and channel conditions. Despite their success, conventional deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods such as proximal policy optimization (PPO) suffer from poor sample efficiency, limited generalization, and costly retraining when state and action spaces change. To address these bottlenecks, we propose a Prompt Decision Transformer (PromptDT) based multi-task learning framework capable of learning across diverse network configurations and reformulating multi-cell selection as a sequence modeling problem. By leveraging offline trajectories and task-specific prompts, PromptDT enables scalable learning across diverse network configurations, including varying base stations and user equipment counts, and scheduler policies. Experimental results demonstrate that PromptDT improves QoE by up to 49% in multi-task settings compared to baselines, with performance scaling positively alongside model capacity. Moreover, PromptDT generalizes effectively to unseen tasks, achieving robust few-shot adaptation to new network configurations without retraining or fine-tuning.
Jun 2, 2026cs.LG

Dual Advantage Fields

Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning requires both long-horizon reachability estimates and local action comparisons. Dual goal representations provide value fields that capture global goal reachability, but they do not directly specify which action should be preferred at a given state. We propose Dual Advantage Fields, a policy-extraction method that turns a bilinear dual value model into a local advantage signal. Under bilinear dual parameterization, the goal embedding is the gradient of the value field with respect to the state representation. DAF learns an action-effect model that predicts the discounted feature displacement induced by an action and scores actions by the alignment between this displacement and the goal direction. In the realizable case, this score equals the goal-conditioned Bellman advantage, yielding a standard local policy-improvement guarantee. On OGBench locomotion, manipulation, and puzzle tasks, DAF improves aggregate RLiable metrics and performs strongly in settings where locally correct actions differ from direct movement toward the final goal.
Jun 2, 2026cs.LG

When Offline Selectors Cannot Beat the Best Single Model: A Diagnostic Study on edX Dropout Prediction

Different predictors often excel on different inputs, so picking the best one per instance promises higher accuracy than committing to a single model. In practice, selectors trained from logged data routinely fail to beat the strongest single predictor. Three causes typically go unseparated before more tuning is applied: a mismatched learner, a state that does not predict which model wins, or buffer-to-deployment label shift. A three-stage diagnostic rules them out on a shared buffer. Stage1 estimates a local ceiling on oracle recovery from kk-NN label consistency. Stage2 asks whether paired BC and offline-RL learners (BC, DQN, and CQL across penalty weights) reach that ceiling. Stage~3 ablates the selector state to test whether richer features would raise it. The combined verdict points to the most promising next step: tuning the learner, redesigning the state, or collecting new data. We apply it to selecting among five dropout-prediction models on edX clickstream data. Across 16 windows, the oracle beats the strongest single base model by 9.7 accuracy points on average, yet BC, DQN, and CQL land in the same test-accuracy band below it (robust to a tenfold buffer sweep and N=2,000N{=}2{,}000 held-out examples). The bottleneck is local representational ambiguity: CQL closes the imitation gap without a deployment gain (not conservatism), regret clusters tightly across learners (not tie-breaking), and the three learners converge on test accuracy (not shift). The next iteration should change the state or collect new data, not tune the offline learner further.
May 31, 2026cs.LG

From Reward-Free Representations to Preferences: Rethinking Offline Preference-Based Reinforcement Learning

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) avoids explicit reward engineering by learning from pairwise human preference feedback. Existing offline PbRL methods typically follow a two-stage pipeline, first learning a reward or preference model from labeled preferences and then performing offline RL on unlabeled data. We revisit offline PbRL through the lens of reward-free representation learning (RFRL) from the zero-shot RL literature, and propose a new training framework that first learns latent successor-measure representations from reward-free offline data, followed by contrastive search and fine-tuning using preference data. Through extensive experiments and ablations, we show that our method achieves superior preference efficiency over offline PbRL baselines. This work is the first to connect RFRL with PbRL, highlighting its potential as a feedback-efficient solution. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/rl-bandits-lab/FB-PbRL.
May 31, 2026cs.LG

Interaction-Limited Safe Continuous-Time RL for Dynamical Medical Treatment

Dynamic medical treatment requires deciding treatment intensity and intervention timing, while patient states evolve continuously and adverse events may occur between clinical interactions. Most existing treatment learning methods assume fixed schedules or enforce safety only at discrete decision points. We propose Interaction-Limited Safe Continuous-Time Reinforcement Learning, a framework that jointly optimizes treatment administration and clinical interaction timing under trajectory-level safety constraints. Our key idea is to reformulate the continuous time treatment problem as an option-based semi-Markov decision process, where each option specifies a continuous-time treatment policy and its duration. We develop a safety-tightening mechanism showing that suitably constructed constraints at interaction times guarantee safety over the full continuous-time trajectory with high probability. We further establish finite-sample guarantees for policy learning from logged treatment trajectories and introduce a practical data-driven conservative surrogate. Experiments show that the proposed adaptive interaction-timing mechanism improves both safety and treatment effectiveness over equidistant interaction schemes across different safe policy optimization methods.
May 30, 2026cs.LG

Behavior-Invariant Task Representation Learning with Transformer-based World Models for Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Offline meta-reinforcement learning leverages static datasets to enable agents to generalize to unseen environments by combining offline efficiency with meta-learning adaptability, yet it faces key challenges from context and policy distribution shifts. These issues hinder agents from adapting to online environments, and are further exacerbated under sparse-reward settings. As a result, agents often become trapped in an inherent pattern dilemma, failing to achieve robust generalization. In this work, we propose a novel framework that integrates information-theoretic task representation learning with a Transformer-based stochastic world model. Our approach extracts task-defining latent variables that are invariant to behavior policy, thereby effectively mitigating the context distribution shift. To further handle policy shift and model exploitation, we apply a conservative value penalty to imagination-based rollouts, preventing the policy from exploiting model inaccuracies while maintaining robust adaptation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, with superior stability and generalization under out-of-distribution and sparse-reward settings.
May 30, 2026cs.AI

Regularized Offline Policy Optimization with Posterior Hybrid Bayesian Belief

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize policies from pre-collected datasets. A bottleneck of this paradigm is managing epistemic uncertainty, which arises from limited data coverage (sample-level) and the ambiguity in identifying transition dynamics from finite data (model-level). To provide a unified quantification of these uncertainties, Bayesian RL has been proposed by treating the dynamics model as a random variable and maintaining a corresponding belief. Despite its theoretical appeal, policy optimization in Bayesian RL remains computationally challenging as it requires solving composite objectives with expectations. Prior methods either employ search-based techniques with poor computational scalability or impose restrictive posterior assumptions that sacrifice the adaptability of Bayesian RL. To address these limitations, we propose Posterior Hybrid Bayesian Belief (PhyB), which reformulates the expectation as a convex combination over a subset of dynamics models. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that the objective discrepancy induced by this approximation remains bounded. Based on PhyB, we develop an iterative regularized policy optimization algorithm that provides metric-agnostic guarantees for monotonic improvement until convergence. Empirical results demonstrate that PhyB achieves state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks.
May 29, 2026cs.LG

Drift Q-Learning

Offline reinforcement learning requires improving a policy from fixed data while avoiding out-of-distribution actions with unreliable value estimates. Diffusion and flow policies handle this trade-off by modeling the behavior distribution to regularize the RL objective, but they require iterative denoising, solver integrations, and in more efficient variants, distillation or other approximations at inference. We propose DriftQL, which combines a drift-based behavioral regularizer with critic-driven policy improvement. The value signal biases the policy toward high-value regions of the data support, while attraction and repulsion together keep generated actions near the data and prevent collapse onto a single mode. DriftQL is implemented as a single network with a unified training objective and generates actions in a single forward pass. On D4RL and OGBench, DriftQL consistently outperforms diffusion and flow methods, advancing the state of the art. Under degraded data quality, where the baselines visibly struggle, DriftQL remains close to its clean-data performance, positioning it as a promising alternative to diffusion and flow-based methods while maintaining the simplicity and efficiency of deterministic approaches. Project page: https://driftql.github.io/
May 29, 2026cs.LG

DRIFT: Decoupled Rollouts and Importance-Weighted Fine-Tuning for Efficient Multi-Turn Optimization

Large language models are increasingly deployed in multi-turn interactive settings where users or environments can iteratively provide lightweight feedback. Unfortunately, optimizing such behavior presents a sharp dilemma in practice: online reinforcement learning is able to effectively address multi-turn dynamics but is prohibitively expensive due to the cost of generating full correction trajectories at every update, whereas offline supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is efficient but suffers from distribution shift and behavioral collapse. To this end, we novelly propose DRIFT (Decoupled Rollouts and Importance-Weighted Fine-Tuning), a framework that operationalizes the theoretical insight that the KL-regularized RL objective is equivalent to importance-weighted supervised learning. DRIFT decouples rollout from optimization by sampling offline interaction trajectories from a fixed reference policy, deriving return-based importance weights, and optimizing the policy via weighted SFT on the resulting dataset. Empirically, we demonstrate that DRIFT matches or exceeds the performance of multi-turn reinforcement learning baselines while maintaining the training efficiency and simplicity of standard supervised fine-tuning. Code is available at https://github.com/2020-qqtcg/DRIFT.
May 29, 2026cs.LG

A Lecture Note on Offline RL and IRL, Part II: Foundations of Inverse Reinforcement Learning and Dynamic Discrete Choice Models

In the forward reinforcement-learning problem, the reward is fixed and known; the learner is asked to find a good policy or value function. Here we turn the question around. Given offline data generated by an expert, can we recover the reward the expert was optimizing? This is the inverse reinforcement learning problem, and remarkably, two communities, structural econometricians studying dynamic discrete choice (DDC) and machine learners studying entropy-regularized IRL, have been working on exactly the same probabilistic model under different names. We begin by proving their equivalence. We then develop the classical identification result of Magnac and Thesmar and the classical computational paradigms that grew out of it: Rust's nested fixed-point algorithm, the conditional-choice-probability approach of Hotz and Miller, and the two temporal-difference approaches of Adusumilli and Eckardt: linear semi-gradient TD and approximate value iteration. Each route has its limits: dimensionality, transition-kernel estimation, the deadly triad, or projected fixed-point bias. We then walk through the modern ML/IRL strand: adversarial IRL, occupancy matching, IQ-Learn, and offline ML-IRL, deriving each method's actual objective and stating precisely what it does and does not identify. We close with the empirical-risk-minimization framework of Kang et al., which yields a gradient-based estimator for offline IRL/DDC.
May 28, 2026cs.LG

UNIQ: Conformal Calibration for Adaptive Conservatism in Offline Reinforcement Learning

Offline reinforcement learning requires careful conservatism to mitigate distribution shift, yet most existing methods apply a fixed penalty uniformly across all states regardless of local data coverage. We present UNIQ (Uncertainty-Informed Quantile), an offline RL method that introduces state-adaptive conservatism through conformally calibrated uncertainty estimation. Built on the Implicit Q-Learning (IQL) backbone, UNIQ trains a multi-expectile value ensemble, computes distribution-free uncertainty estimates using split conformal prediction, and maps the resulting signal to a state-dependent expectile that relaxes conservatism in well-covered regions while strengthening it in uncertain regions near the data frontier. On D4RL MuJoCo benchmarks, UNIQ consistently improves over IQL, with the largest gains observed on Walker2d and replay-heavy tasks. At the same time, UNIQ operates at near-IQL memory cost (approximately 250 MB peak VRAM), providing roughly a 10x reduction compared to EDAC. Rather than pursuing overall state-of-the-art performance, we position UNIQ as a practical mechanism contribution that improves the performance-efficiency trade-off in offline reinforcement learning.
May 27, 2026cs.LG

Return-to-Go Is More Than a Number: Q-Guided Alignment for Return-Conditioned Supervised Learning

Conditioned Sequence Models (CSMs) learn policies by treating return-to-go (RTG) as a control signal. However, existing CSMs often treat the RTGs as simple numerical inputs rather than aligning them with the performance of their policies. In this paper, we propose Q-ALIGN DT, a framework that enforces this alignment by ensuring the QQ-value of the output policy is consistent with the input RTG. By leveraging a QQ function to provide dense guidance to CSMs and further fine-tuning it using an RTG-perturbation technique with the CSM, our method ensures that higher RTGs are consistently mapped to trajectories with higher expected returns. Theoretically, we show that Q-ALIGN DT can efficiently learn the desired policy and output a near-optimal one when the RTG is sufficiently high. Empirically, we demonstrate through extensive experiments that Q-ALIGN DT achieves superior controllability and performance across the D4RL benchmark. Remarkably, our model effectively learns a structured family of policies that maintains precise alignment and generalizes to tasks like velocity-tracking where prior methods fail.
May 27, 2026cs.AI

Efficient Post-training of LLMs for Code Generation With Offline Reinforcement Learning

Post-training using online reinforcement learning (RL) is an important training step for LLMs, including code-generating models. However, online RL for code generation involves LLM inference and verification of the generated output, which can take considerable time and resources. In this paper, we explore the application of offline RL to code-generating models by leveraging existing code datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that offline RL is an effective training strategy for improving LLM performance. We show that offline RL can be especially beneficial for small LLMs and challenging coding problems.
May 27, 2026cs.LG

Adaptive Coarse-to-Fine Subgoal Refinement for Long-Horizon Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) is challenging in long-horizon tasks, where distant state--goal pairs provide weak supervision and value estimates become vulnerable to accumulated bootstrapping errors. Hierarchical methods mitigate this difficulty by introducing intermediate subgoals, but fixed temporal abstractions or fixed hierarchy depths can be mismatched to state--goal pairs with different reachability horizons. We propose Coarse-to-Fine Hierarchical Goal Reinforcement Learning (CFHRL), a fully offline GCRL framework that adaptively refines distant goals before execution. Starting from the final goal, CFHRL recursively proposes intermediate targets, trained from replay-supported candidates, and stops refinement once the current target is estimated to be locally executable by a learned reachability cost. The key idea is that a subgoal need not be an exact midpoint or globally optimal waypoint; it only needs to provide reliable progress and reduce the remaining reaching difficulty, enabling subsequent refinement over shorter horizons. A stylized analysis further supports the robustness of approximate recursive contraction. Experiments on OGBench show substantial gains on several long-horizon tasks, with ablations validating the proposed refinement and stopping mechanisms
May 27, 2026cs.LG

SPAR: Support-Preserving Action Rectification

Offline policy improvement faces an inherent conflict between maximizing value and fitting the data distribution. While in-sample weighted regression is stable, it suffers from over-conservatism that suppresses high-value actions in the distribution tail; conversely, gradient-based approaches often exhibit a fitting-optimization conflict of gradients, which drives the policy off the data manifold. To address this, we propose Support-Preserving Action Rectification (SPAR), which reframes global learning as a local residual rectification anchored to a frozen pure behavior cloning policy. This framework performs fine-grained fitting and local policy improvement in the residual space, thereby contracting the search space. We further introduce Latent Self-Imitation, utilizing a latent-sampling weighted-regression mechanism to address fitting-improvement gradient conflict in the residual space. Theoretically, we prove this mechanism eliminates the manifold-normal drift of standard value gradients, while extensive D4RL experiments show SPAR extracts significant gains from suboptimal baselines to achieve state-of-the-art performance.
May 26, 2026cs.LG

Trust Region Q Adjoint Matching

Off-policy reinforcement learning of pretrained flow policies remains challenging due to the instability of optimization arising from the multi-step sampling process. Recently, Q-learning with Adjoint Matching (QAM) addressed this by recasting policy improvement as a stochastic optimal control (SOC) problem guided by a learned critic. However, QAM inherits a fundamental fragility of critic-guided improvement, since small critic errors can be exponentially amplified and often lead to performance collapse. This paper introduces Trust Region Q Adjoint Matching (TRQAM), a stable off-policy fine-tuning algorithm that adaptively controls the path-space KL between the fine-tuned and pretrained policies through projected dual descent. Specifically, we adapt a trust-region parameter λλ inside the sampling process of the flow policy and prove that λλ exactly weights the path-space KL in the SOC objective. As a result, our method can tightly control the deviation from the pretrained policy within a prescribed KL budget, achieving stable off-policy RL. Through experiments on 50 OGBench tasks, TRQAM consistently outperforms prior methods in both offline RL and offline-to-online RL. In particular, TRQAM achieves an overall success rate of 68% in offline RL, substantially improving over the strongest baseline at 46%.
May 25, 2026cs.AI

Exploiting Local Dynamics Regularity for Reusable Skills in Offline Hierarchical RL

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) promises to solve long-horizon Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks more efficiently than non-hierarchical counterparts by discovering and reusing temporally-extended skills. However, obtaining skills that are actually reusable remains an open challenge. Towards this end, we focus on abstractions that exploit the intuition of local dynamics: local transitions in different global contexts require similar kinds of action sequences. By aligning these contexts with the action sequences they require, we are able to learn which skills to reuse and where to reuse them. In principle, this information should benefit many HRL algorithms, where high-level policies have to reason about the low-level skills they use. The resulting algorithm CARL (Contrastive Action-based Representations for Reusable Local Control) shows both qualitative clustering of meaningful skills in complex humanoid environments and improved downstream performance on the OGBench benchmark when integrated with HIQL.
May 25, 2026cs.LG

Latent Representation Alignment for Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) provides a practical framework for obtaining goal-reaching policies from fixed datasets. However, learning a reliable goal-conditioned value function in long-horizon tasks remains challenging. In this paper, we identify erroneous generalization in goal-conditioned value functions as a fundamental bottleneck, and demonstrate that appropriate inductive bias in the value function is crucial for addressing the bottleneck. Building on these findings, we propose Latent-Aligned Value Learning (LAVL), an offline GCRL algorithm that integrates latent-representation-based value generalization with hierarchical planning in a unified framework. Extensive experiments on OGBench demonstrate that LAVL consistently outperforms existing offline GCRL methods, achieving the highest performance on 20 out of 22 datasets. Notably, LAVL exhibits strong performance in long-horizon tasks and trajectory stitching datasets, where prior methods suffer significant performance degradation. Our code is available at https://github.com/oh-lab/LAVL.git.
May 25, 2026cs.AI

Back to Parsimonious Latents: Learning Task-Centric World Models from Visual Foundations

World models enable agents to predict future dynamics conditioned on actions, making the choice of latent representation central to planning and control. Such representations are often either learned directly from pixels with limited semantic structure or inherited from frozen visual foundation models with excessive task-irrelevant detail, yielding state spaces that are poorly matched to downstream planning and control. This is especially challenging in reward-free offline settings, where the model must learn from fixed trajectories without reward supervision or online interaction. To address this, we propose TC-WM, a framework for turning foundation-model embeddings into compact, task-sufficient world representations. The key design is to treat the pretrained embedding space as a semantic scaffold rather than as the final state space: TC-WM linearly projects high-dimensional visual embeddings into a compact latent as the dynamic space, aligns a subspace with the agent's physical state via contrastive learning, and reconstructs embeddings to preserve useful visual structure. This combines the generality of foundation features with the controllability of task-centric dynamics. Theoretically, we show that TC-WM suffices to identify the underlying task-centric latent factors up to a simple transformation. Empirically, TC-WM enables test-time planning across diverse environments (e.g., Robomimic and D4RL), achieving better world-modeling quality and more precise control than state-of-the-art approaches.
May 25, 2026cs.LG

SeqRoute: Global Budget-Aware Sequential LLM Routing via Offline Reinforcement Learning

Existing LLM routing frameworks treat queries as independent events, neglecting the sequential nature of real-world user sessions constrained by global computational budgets. This mismatch inevitably leads to budget bankruptcy: myopic routing policies exhaust resources on early interactions, forcing subsequent and often more complex queries onto inadequate models. We introduce SeqRoute, a framework that formulates multi-turn routing as a finite-horizon Markov Decision Process and solves it via offline reinforcement learning. By incorporating the remaining budget into the state space and training with Conservative Q-Learning (CQL), SeqRoute learns delayed gratification to strategically preserve resources for high-stakes turns later in the session. To overcome data starvation, we propose Hindsight Budget Relabeling (HBR). This technique retrospectively simulates historical trajectories under diverse hypothetical budgets, expanding 10,000 raw sessions into 2.38 million transitions enriched with critical bankruptcy signals. At deployment, a dynamic λλ-sweep mechanism enables zero-shot navigation of the cost-quality Pareto frontier without retraining. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SeqRoute reduces operational costs by 6.0-73.5% while maintaining or improving quality, and suppresses bankruptcy rates to under 1%, strictly dominating behavior cloning, budget-aware heuristics, and static baselines across the entire Pareto frontier.
May 24, 2026cs.LG

Unifying Value Alignment and Assignment in Cross-Domain Offline Reinforcement Learning with Heterogeneous Datasets

Cross-domain offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy in the target domain with a limited target domain dataset and a source domain dataset that exhibits a dynamics shift. Training directly on the original source dataset typically leads to performance collapse. Recent studies perform data filtering from the perspective of dynamics alignment or value alignment to enable efficient policy transfer. However, these studies are typically validated on single-domain or single-behavior-policy source datasets. In this work, we explore a more general heterogeneous cross-domain offline RL setting, where the source datasets may be collected from multiple source domains by diverse behavior policies. We first uncover a critical yet overlooked issue in this setting: value misassignment. Empirically and theoretically, we demonstrate that value misassignment can undermine value alignment, mislead data filtering toward selecting suboptimal samples, and loosen the suboptimality gap, thereby degrading the agent's performance. To address this issue, we propose V2A, which integrates dynamics alignment, value alignment, and value assignment. V2A first employs temporally-consistent modality representation learning to extract dynamics modalities from the source dataset, followed by modality-aware advantage learning to rectify value alignment. Finally, it adopts a data filtering paradigm to selectively share source data for policy learning. Empirical results show that V2A significantly outperforms strong baseline methods under general heterogeneous cross-domain offline RL settings.