Chenjia Bai

Shuang Qiu, Lingxiao Wang, Chenjia Bai et al.

In view of its power in extracting feature representation, contrastive self-supervised learning has been successfully integrated into the practice of (deep) reinforcement learning (RL), leading to efficient policy learning in various applications. Despite its tremendous empirical successes, the understanding of contrastive learning for RL remains elusive. To narrow such a gap, we study how RL can be empowered by contrastive learning in a class of Markov decision processes (MDPs) and Markov games (MGs) with low-rank transitions. For both models, we propose to extract the correct feature representations of the low-rank model by minimizing a contrastive loss. Moreover, under the online setting, we propose novel upper confidence bound (UCB)-type algorithms that incorporate such a contrastive loss with online RL algorithms for MDPs or MGs. We further theoretically prove that our algorithm recovers the true representations and simultaneously achieves sample efficiency in learning the optimal policy and Nash equilibrium in MDPs and MGs. We also provide empirical studies to demonstrate the efficacy of the UCB-based contrastive learning method for RL. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first provably efficient online RL algorithm that incorporates contrastive learning for representation learning. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Baichenjia/Contrastive-UCB.

Rui Yang, Chenjia Bai, Xiaoteng Ma et al.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a promising direction to exploit massive amount of offline data for complex decision-making tasks. Due to the distribution shift issue, current offline RL algorithms are generally designed to be conservative in value estimation and action selection. However, such conservatism can impair the robustness of learned policies when encountering observation deviation under realistic conditions, such as sensor errors and adversarial attacks. To trade off robustness and conservatism, we propose Robust Offline Reinforcement Learning (RORL) with a novel conservative smoothing technique. In RORL, we explicitly introduce regularization on the policy and the value function for states near the dataset, as well as additional conservative value estimation on these states. Theoretically, we show RORL enjoys a tighter suboptimality bound than recent theoretical results in linear MDPs. We demonstrate that RORL can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the general offline RL benchmark and is considerably robust to adversarial observation perturbations.

Xiaoyu Wen, Xudong Yu, Rui Yang et al.

To obtain a near-optimal policy with fewer interactions in Reinforcement Learning (RL), a promising approach involves the combination of offline RL, which enhances sample efficiency by leveraging offline datasets, and online RL, which explores informative transitions by interacting with the environment. Offline-to-Online (O2O) RL provides a paradigm for improving an offline trained agent within limited online interactions. However, due to the significant distribution shift between online experiences and offline data, most offline RL algorithms suffer from performance drops and fail to achieve stable policy improvement in O2O adaptation. To address this problem, we propose the Robust Offline-to-Online (RO2O) algorithm, designed to enhance offline policies through uncertainty and smoothness, and to mitigate the performance drop in online adaptation. Specifically, RO2O incorporates Q-ensemble for uncertainty penalty and adversarial samples for policy and value smoothness, which enable RO2O to maintain a consistent learning procedure in online adaptation without requiring special changes to the learning objective. Theoretical analyses in linear MDPs demonstrate that the uncertainty and smoothness lead to a tighter optimality bound in O2O against distribution shift. Experimental results illustrate the superiority of RO2O in facilitating stable offline-to-online learning and achieving significant improvement with limited online interactions.

Shirong Liu, Chenjia Bai, Zixian Guo et al.

Policy constraint methods in offline reinforcement learning employ additional regularization techniques to constrain the discrepancy between the learned policy and the offline dataset. However, these methods tend to result in overly conservative policies that resemble the behavior policy, thus limiting their performance. We investigate this limitation and attribute it to the static nature of traditional constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic policy constraint that restricts the learned policy on the samples generated by the exponential moving average of previously learned policies. By integrating this self-constraint mechanism into off-policy methods, our method facilitates the learning of non-conservative policies while avoiding policy collapse in the offline setting. Theoretical results show that our approach results in a nearly monotonically improved reference policy. Extensive experiments on the D4RL MuJoCo domain demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance among the policy constraint methods.

Zhao Shan, Chenyou Fan, Shuang Qiu et al.

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in sequential decision-making by leveraging the highly expressive model capabilities in policy learning. A central problem for learning diffusion policies is to align the policy output with human intents in various tasks. To achieve this, previous methods conduct return-conditioned policy generation or Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based policy optimization, while they both rely on pre-defined reward functions. In this work, we propose a novel framework, Forward KL regularized Preference optimization for aligning Diffusion policies, to align the diffusion policy with preferences directly. We first train a diffusion policy from the offline dataset without considering the preference, and then align the policy to the preference data via direct preference optimization. During the alignment phase, we formulate direct preference learning in a diffusion policy, where the forward KL regularization is employed in preference optimization to avoid generating out-of-distribution actions. We conduct extensive experiments for MetaWorld manipulation and D4RL tasks. The results show our method exhibits superior alignment with preferences and outperforms previous state-of-the-art algorithms.

Jiafei Lyu, Chenjia Bai, Jingwen Yang et al.

It is vital to learn effective policies that can be transferred to different domains with dynamics discrepancies in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we consider dynamics adaptation settings where there exists dynamics mismatch between the source domain and the target domain, and one can get access to sufficient source domain data, while can only have limited interactions with the target domain. Existing methods address this problem by learning domain classifiers, performing data filtering from a value discrepancy perspective, etc. Instead, we tackle this challenge from a decoupled representation learning perspective. We perform representation learning only in the target domain and measure the representation deviations on the transitions from the source domain, which we show can be a signal of dynamics mismatch. We also show that representation deviation upper bounds performance difference of a given policy in the source domain and target domain, which motivates us to adopt representation deviation as a reward penalty. The produced representations are not involved in either policy or value function, but only serve as a reward penalizer. We conduct extensive experiments on environments with kinematic and morphology mismatch, and the results show that our method exhibits strong performance on many tasks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/dmksjfl/PAR.

Chenyou Fan, Chenjia Bai, Zhao Shan et al.

Diffusion models have demonstrated their capabilities in modeling trajectories of multi-tasks. However, existing multi-task planners or policies typically rely on task-specific demonstrations via multi-task imitation, or require task-specific reward labels to facilitate policy optimization via Reinforcement Learning (RL). They are costly due to the substantial human efforts required to collect expert data or design reward functions. To address these challenges, we aim to develop a versatile diffusion planner capable of leveraging large-scale inferior data that contains task-agnostic sub-optimal trajectories, with the ability to fast adapt to specific tasks. In this paper, we propose SODP, a two-stage framework that leverages Sub-Optimal data to learn a Diffusion Planner, which is generalizable for various downstream tasks. Specifically, in the pre-training stage, we train a foundation diffusion planner that extracts general planning capabilities by modeling the versatile distribution of multi-task trajectories, which can be sub-optimal and has wide data coverage. Then for downstream tasks, we adopt RL-based fine-tuning with task-specific rewards to quickly refine the diffusion planner, which aims to generate action sequences with higher task-specific returns. Experimental results from multi-task domains including Meta-World and Adroit demonstrate that SODP outperforms state-of-the-art methods with only a small amount of data for reward-guided fine-tuning.

Chenjia Bai, Lingxiao Wang, Jianye Hao et al.

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promising results in learning a task-specific policy from a fixed dataset. However, successful offline RL often relies heavily on the coverage and quality of the given dataset. In scenarios where the dataset for a specific task is limited, a natural approach is to improve offline RL with datasets from other tasks, namely, to conduct Multi-Task Data Sharing (MTDS). Nevertheless, directly sharing datasets from other tasks exacerbates the distribution shift in offline RL. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty-based MTDS approach that shares the entire dataset without data selection. Given ensemble-based uncertainty quantification, we perform pessimistic value iteration on the shared offline dataset, which provides a unified framework for single- and multi-task offline RL. We further provide theoretical analysis, which shows that the optimality gap of our method is only related to the expected data coverage of the shared dataset, thus resolving the distribution shift issue in data sharing. Empirically, we release an MTDS benchmark and collect datasets from three challenging domains. The experimental results show our algorithm outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods in challenging MTDS problems. See https://github.com/Baichenjia/UTDS for the datasets and code.

Zhongjian Qiao, Rui Yang, Jiafei Lyu et al.

Cross-Domain Offline Reinforcement Learning aims to train an agent deployed in the target environment, leveraging both a limited target domain dataset and a source domain dataset with (possibly) sufficient data coverage. Due to the underlying dynamics misalignment between the source and target domain, simply merging the data from two datasets may incur inferior performance. Recent advances address this issue by selectively sharing source domain samples that exhibit dynamics alignment with the target domain. However, these approaches focus solely on dynamics alignment and overlook \textit{value alignment}, i.e., selecting high-quality, high-value samples from the source domain. In this paper, we first demonstrate that both dynamics alignment and value alignment are essential for policy learning, by examining the limitations of the current theoretical framework for cross-domain RL and establishing a concrete sub-optimality gap of a policy trained on the source domain and evaluated on the target domain. Motivated by the theoretical insights, we propose to selectively share those source domain samples with both high dynamics and value alignment and present our \textbf{\underline{D}}ynamics- and \textbf{\underline{V}}alue-aligned \textbf{\underline{D}}ata \textbf{\underline{F}}iltering (DVDF) method. We design a range of dynamics shift settings, including kinematic and morphology shifts, and evaluate DVDF on various tasks and datasets, as well as in challenging extremely low-data settings where the target domain dataset contains only 5,000 transitions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVDF consistently outperforms prior strong baselines and delivers exceptional performance across multiple tasks and datasets.

Jiafei Lyu, Kang Xu, Jiacheng Xu et al.

We consider off-dynamics reinforcement learning (RL) where one needs to transfer policies across different domains with dynamics mismatch. Despite the focus on developing dynamics-aware algorithms, this field is hindered due to the lack of a standard benchmark. To bridge this gap, we introduce ODRL, the first benchmark tailored for evaluating off-dynamics RL methods. ODRL contains four experimental settings where the source and target domains can be either online or offline, and provides diverse tasks and a broad spectrum of dynamics shifts, making it a reliable platform to comprehensively evaluate the agent's adaptation ability to the target domain. Furthermore, ODRL includes recent off-dynamics RL algorithms in a unified framework and introduces some extra baselines for different settings, all implemented in a single-file manner. To unpack the true adaptation capability of existing methods, we conduct extensive benchmarking experiments, which show that no method has universal advantages across varied dynamics shifts. We hope this benchmark can serve as a cornerstone for future research endeavors. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/OffDynamicsRL/off-dynamics-rl.

Yang Zhang, Xinran Li, Jianing Ye et al.

World models have recently attracted growing interest in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) due to their ability to improve sample efficiency for policy learning. However, accurately modeling environments in MARL is challenging due to the exponentially large joint action space and highly uncertain dynamics inherent in multi-agent systems. To address this, we reduce modeling complexity by shifting from jointly modeling the entire state-action transition dynamics to focusing on the state space alone at each timestep through sequential agent modeling. Specifically, our approach enables the model to progressively resolve uncertainty while capturing the structured dependencies among agents, providing a more accurate representation of how agents influence the state. Interestingly, this sequential revelation of agents' actions in a multi-agent system aligns with the reverse process in diffusion models--a class of powerful generative models known for their expressiveness and training stability compared to autoregressive or latent variable models. Leveraging this insight, we develop a flexible and robust world model for MARL using diffusion models. Our method, Diffusion-Inspired Multi-Agent world model (DIMA), achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple multi-agent control benchmarks, significantly outperforming prior world models in terms of final return and sample efficiency, including MAMuJoCo and Bi-DexHands. DIMA establishes a new paradigm for constructing multi-agent world models, advancing the frontier of MARL research. Codes are open-sourced at https://github.com/breez3young/DIMA.

Xinran Li, Xiaolu Wang, Chenjia Bai et al.

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), well-designed communication protocols can effectively facilitate consensus among agents, thereby enhancing task performance. Moreover, in large-scale multi-agent systems commonly found in real-world applications, effective communication plays an even more critical role due to the escalated challenge of partial observability compared to smaller-scale setups. In this work, we endeavor to develop a scalable communication protocol for MARL. Unlike previous methods that focus on selecting optimal pairwise communication links-a task that becomes increasingly complex as the number of agents grows-we adopt a global perspective on communication topology design. Specifically, we propose utilizing the exponential topology to enable rapid information dissemination among agents by leveraging its small-diameter and small-size properties. This approach leads to a scalable communication protocol, named ExpoComm. To fully unlock the potential of exponential graphs as communication topologies, we employ memory-based message processors and auxiliary tasks to ground messages, ensuring that they reflect global information and benefit decision-making. Extensive experiments on large-scale cooperative benchmarks, including MAgent and Infrastructure Management Planning, demonstrate the superior performance and robust zero-shot transferability of ExpoComm compared to existing communication strategies. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/LXXXXR/ExpoComm.

Siyuan Yang, Yang Zhang, Haoran He et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, trained via flow-matching or diffusion objectives, excel at learning complex behaviors from large-scale, multi-modal datasets (e.g., human teleoperation, scripted policies). However, since VLAs incorporate diverse data modes in the pre-training stage, and the finetuning dataset often contains demonstration data collected in a kinematically suboptimal or undesirable way, it exists redundant action modes that are irrelevant to the success action modes of the downstream task. Specifically, we observe a critical inference-time fragility among various sampled noises after supervised finetuning of pre-trained VLAs. In this paper, we attribute this instability to the distribution shift between the VLA policy and the policy induced by stable success modes of the downstream task dataset. Thus, we propose \textbf{TACO}, a test-time-scaling (TTS) framework that applies a lightweight pseudo-count estimator as a high-fidelity verifier of action chunks. The VLA models integrated with TACO can execute the actions with maximum pseudo-count from all sampled action chunks, thereby preventing distribution shifts while preserving the generalization ability of VLAs since the constraint is applied only during inference. Our method resembles the classical anti-exploration principle in offline reinforcement learning (RL), and being gradient-free, it incurs significant computational benefits compared to RL update, especially for flow or diffusion-based VLAs which are difficult to perform RL update due to denoising process. Extensive experiments across four simulation benchmarks (RoboTwin2.0, Robotwin, LIBERO, SimplerEnv) and a dual-arm platform demonstrate that our method significantly improves the inference stability and success rates in downstream-task adaptations.

Yang Zhang, Shixin Yang, Chenjia Bai et al.

Grounding the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) for embodied tasks is challenging due to the complexity of the physical world. Especially, LLM planning for multi-agent collaboration requires communication of agents or credit assignment as the feedback to re-adjust the proposed plans and achieve effective coordination. However, existing methods that overly rely on physical verification or self-reflection suffer from excessive and inefficient querying of LLMs. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for multi-agent collaboration that introduces Reinforced Advantage feedback (ReAd) for efficient self-refinement of plans. Specifically, we perform critic regression to learn a sequential advantage function from LLM-planned data, and then treat the LLM planner as an optimizer to generate actions that maximize the advantage function. It endows the LLM with the foresight to discern whether the action contributes to accomplishing the final task. We provide theoretical analysis by extending advantage-weighted regression in reinforcement learning to multi-agent systems. Experiments on Overcooked-AI and a difficult variant of RoCoBench show that ReAd surpasses baselines in success rate, and also significantly decreases the interaction steps of agents and query rounds of LLMs, demonstrating its high efficiency for grounding LLMs. More results are given at https://embodied-read.github.io

Haoran He, Chenjia Bai, Ling Pan et al.

Learning a generalist embodied agent capable of completing multiple tasks poses challenges, primarily stemming from the scarcity of action-labeled robotic datasets. In contrast, a vast amount of human videos exist, capturing intricate tasks and interactions with the physical world. Promising prospects arise for utilizing actionless human videos for pre-training and transferring the knowledge to facilitate robot policy learning through limited robot demonstrations. However, it remains a challenge due to the domain gap between humans and robots. Moreover, it is difficult to extract useful information representing the dynamic world from human videos, because of its noisy and multimodal data structure. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework to tackle these challenges, which leverages a unified discrete diffusion to combine generative pre-training on human videos and policy fine-tuning on a small number of action-labeled robot videos. We start by compressing both human and robot videos into unified video tokens. In the pre-training stage, we employ a discrete diffusion model with a mask-and-replace diffusion strategy to predict future video tokens in the latent space. In the fine-tuning stage, we harness the imagined future videos to guide low-level action learning with a limited set of robot data. Experiments demonstrate that our method generates high-fidelity future videos for planning and enhances the fine-tuned policies compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches with superior performance. Our project website is available at https://video-diff.github.io/.

Weiji Xie, Jinrui Han, Jiakun Zheng et al.

Humanoid robots are promising to acquire various skills by imitating human behaviors. However, existing algorithms are only capable of tracking smooth, low-speed human motions, even with delicate reward and curriculum design. This paper presents a physics-based humanoid control framework, aiming to master highly-dynamic human behaviors such as Kungfu and dancing through multi-steps motion processing and adaptive motion tracking. For motion processing, we design a pipeline to extract, filter out, correct, and retarget motions, while ensuring compliance with physical constraints to the maximum extent. For motion imitation, we formulate a bi-level optimization problem to dynamically adjust the tracking accuracy tolerance based on the current tracking error, creating an adaptive curriculum mechanism. We further construct an asymmetric actor-critic framework for policy training. In experiments, we train whole-body control policies to imitate a set of highly-dynamic motions. Our method achieves significantly lower tracking errors than existing approaches and is successfully deployed on the Unitree G1 robot, demonstrating stable and expressive behaviors. The project page is https://kungfu-bot.github.io.

Chenjia Bai, Yang Zhang, Shuang Qiu et al.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown great potential in fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) to align with human preferences. Existing methods perform preference alignment from a fixed dataset, which can be limited in data coverage, and the resulting reward model is hard to generalize in out-of-distribution responses. Thus, online RLHF is more desirable to empower the LLM to explore outside the support of the initial dataset by iteratively collecting the prompt-response pairs. In this paper, we study the fundamental problem in online RLHF, i.e. \emph{how to explore} for LLM. We give a theoretical motivation in linear reward assumption to show that an optimistic reward with an upper confidence bound (UCB) term leads to a provably efficient RLHF policy. Then, we reformulate our objective to direct preference optimization with an exploration term, where the UCB-term can be converted to a count-based exploration bonus. We further propose a practical algorithm, named \emph{Count-based Online Preference Optimization (COPO)}, which leverages a simple coin-flip counting module to estimate the pseudo-count of a prompt-response pair in previously collected data. COPO encourages LLMs to balance exploration and preference optimization in an iterative manner, which enlarges the exploration space and the entire data coverage of iterative LLM policies. We conduct online RLHF experiments on Zephyr and Llama-3 models. The results on instruction-following and standard academic benchmarks show that COPO significantly increases performance.

Jinyi Liu, Zhi Wang, Yan Zheng et al.

In reinforcement learning, the optimism in the face of uncertainty (OFU) is a mainstream principle for directing exploration towards less explored areas, characterized by higher uncertainty. However, in the presence of environmental stochasticity (noise), purely optimistic exploration may lead to excessive probing of high-noise areas, consequently impeding exploration efficiency. Hence, in exploring noisy environments, while optimism-driven exploration serves as a foundation, prudent attention to alleviating unnecessary over-exploration in high-noise areas becomes beneficial. In this work, we propose Optimistic Value Distribution Explorer (OVD-Explorer) to achieve a noise-aware optimistic exploration for continuous control. OVD-Explorer proposes a new measurement of the policy's exploration ability considering noise in optimistic perspectives, and leverages gradient ascent to drive exploration. Practically, OVD-Explorer can be easily integrated with continuous control RL algorithms. Extensive evaluations on the MuJoCo and GridChaos tasks demonstrate the superiority of OVD-Explorer in achieving noise-aware optimistic exploration.

Ting Xiao, Lei Shi, Peng Liu et al.

Automatic Radiology Report Generation (RRG) is an important topic for alleviating the substantial workload of radiologists. Existing RRG approaches rely on supervised regression based on different architectures or additional knowledge injection,while the generated report may not align optimally with radiologists' preferences. Especially, since the preferences of radiologists are inherently heterogeneous and multidimensional, e.g., some may prioritize report fluency, while others emphasize clinical accuracy. To address this problem,we propose a new RRG method via Multi-objective Preference Optimization (MPO) to align the pre-trained RRG model with multiple human preferences, which can be formulated by multi-dimensional reward functions and optimized by multi-objective reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, we use a preference vector to represent the weight of preferences and use it as a condition for the RRG model. Then, a linearly weighed reward is obtained via a dot product between the preference vector and multi-dimensional reward. Next,the RRG model is optimized to align with the preference vector by optimizing such a reward via RL. In the training stage,we randomly sample diverse preference vectors from the preference space and align the model by optimizing the weighted multi-objective rewards, which leads to an optimal policy on the entire preference space. When inference,our model can generate reports aligned with specific preferences without further fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show the proposed method can generate reports that cater to different preferences in a single model and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Xudong Yu, Chenjia Bai, Haoran He et al.

Sequential decision-making is desired to align with human intents and exhibit versatility across various tasks. Previous methods formulate it as a conditional generation process, utilizing return-conditioned diffusion models to directly model trajectory distributions. Nevertheless, the return-conditioned paradigm relies on pre-defined reward functions, facing challenges when applied in multi-task settings characterized by varying reward functions (versatility) and showing limited controllability concerning human preferences (alignment). In this work, we adopt multi-task preferences as a unified condition for both single- and multi-task decision-making, and propose preference representations aligned with preference labels. The learned representations are used to guide the conditional generation process of diffusion models, and we introduce an auxiliary objective to maximize the mutual information between representations and corresponding generated trajectories, improving alignment between trajectories and preferences. Extensive experiments in D4RL and Meta-World demonstrate that our method presents favorable performance in single- and multi-task scenarios, and exhibits superior alignment with preferences.

Xiaoyu Wen, Chenjia Bai, Kang Xu et al.

Cross-domain offline reinforcement learning leverages source domain data with diverse transition dynamics to alleviate the data requirement for the target domain. However, simply merging the data of two domains leads to performance degradation due to the dynamics mismatch. Existing methods address this problem by measuring the dynamics gap via domain classifiers while relying on the assumptions of the transferability of paired domains. In this paper, we propose a novel representation-based approach to measure the domain gap, where the representation is learned through a contrastive objective by sampling transitions from different domains. We show that such an objective recovers the mutual-information gap of transition functions in two domains without suffering from the unbounded issue of the dynamics gap in handling significantly different domains. Based on the representations, we introduce a data filtering algorithm that selectively shares transitions from the source domain according to the contrastive score functions. Empirical results on various tasks demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance, using only 10% of the target data to achieve 89.2% of the performance on 100% target dataset with state-of-the-art methods.

Zhi Jing, Siyuan Yang, Jicong Ao et al.

For robotic manipulation, existing robotics datasets and simulation benchmarks predominantly cater to robot-arm platforms. However, for humanoid robots equipped with dual arms and dexterous hands, simulation tasks and high-quality demonstrations are notably lacking. Bimanual dexterous manipulation is inherently more complex, as it requires coordinated arm movements and hand operations, making autonomous data collection challenging. This paper presents HumanoidGen, an automated task creation and demonstration collection framework that leverages atomic dexterous operations and LLM reasoning to generate relational constraints. Specifically, we provide spatial annotations for both assets and dexterous hands based on the atomic operations, and perform an LLM planner to generate a chain of actionable spatial constraints for arm movements based on object affordances and scenes. To further improve planning ability, we employ a variant of Monte Carlo tree search to enhance LLM reasoning for long-horizon tasks and insufficient annotation. In experiments, we create a novel benchmark with augmented scenarios to evaluate the quality of the collected data. The results show that the performance of the 2D and 3D diffusion policies can scale with the generated dataset. Project page is https://openhumanoidgen.github.io.

Yang Zhang, Chenwei Wang, Ouyang Lu et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on large, diverse datasets show remarkable potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation. However, a primary bottleneck remains in adapting these models to downstream tasks, especially when the robot's embodiment or the task itself differs from the pre-training data. This discrepancy leads to a significant mismatch in action distributions, demanding extensive data and compute for effective fine-tuning. To address this challenge, we introduce \textbf{Align-Then-stEer (\texttt{ATE})}, a novel, data-efficient, and plug-and-play adaptation framework. \texttt{ATE} first aligns disparate action spaces by constructing a unified latent space, where a variational autoencoder constrained by reverse KL divergence embeds adaptation actions into modes of the pre-training action latent distribution. Subsequently, it steers the diffusion- or flow-based VLA's generation process during fine-tuning via a guidance mechanism that pushes the model's output distribution towards the target domain. We conduct extensive experiments on cross-embodiment and cross-task manipulation in both simulation and real world. Compared to direct fine-tuning of representative VLAs, our method improves the average multi-task success rate by up to \textbf{9.8\%} in simulation and achieves a striking \textbf{32\% success rate gain} in a real-world cross-embodiment setting. Our work presents a general and lightweight solution that greatly enhances the practicality of deploying VLA models to new robotic platforms and tasks.

Runze Liu, Chenjia Bai, Jiafei Lyu et al.

Reward engineering is one of the key challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Preference-based RL effectively addresses this issue by learning from human feedback. However, it is both time-consuming and expensive to collect human preference labels. In this paper, we propose a novel \textbf{V}ision-\textbf{L}anguage \textbf{P}reference learning framework, named \textbf{VLP}, which learns a vision-language preference model to provide preference feedback for embodied manipulation tasks. To achieve this, we define three types of language-conditioned preferences and construct a vision-language preference dataset, which contains versatile implicit preference orders without human annotations. The preference model learns to extract language-related features, and then serves as a preference annotator in various downstream tasks. The policy can be learned according to the annotated preferences via reward learning or direct policy optimization. Extensive empirical results on simulated embodied manipulation tasks demonstrate that our method provides accurate preferences and generalizes to unseen tasks and unseen language instructions, outperforming the baselines by a large margin.

Dayang Liang, Yuhang Lin, Xinzhe Liu et al.

Interaction is one of the core abilities of humanoid robots. However, most existing frameworks focus on non-interactive whole-body control, which limits their practical applicability. In this work, we develop InterReal, a unified physics-based imitation learning framework for Real-world human-object Interaction (HOI) control. InterReal enables humanoid robots to track HOI reference motions, facilitating the learning of fine-grained interactive skills and their deployment in real-world settings. Within this framework, we first introduce a HOI motion data augmentation scheme with hand-object contact constraints, and utilize the augmented motions to improve policy stability under object perturbations. Second, we propose an automatic reward learner to address the challenge of large-scale reward shaping. A meta-policy guided by critical tracking error metrics explores and allocates reward signals to the low-level reinforcement learning objective, which enables more effective learning of interactive policies. Experiments on HOI tasks of box-picking and box-pushing demonstrate that InterReal achieves the best tracking accuracy and the highest task success rate compared to recent baselines. Furthermore, we validate the framework on the real-world robot Unitree G1, which demonstrates its practical effectiveness and robustness beyond simulation.

Xinran Li, Chenjia Bai, Zijian Li et al.

Large language models (LLMs) possess extensive knowledge bases and strong reasoning capabilities, making them promising tools for complex, multi-agent planning in embodied environments. However, despite LLMs' advanced abilities and the sophisticated modular design of agentic methods, existing LLM-based planning algorithms remain limited by weak adaptation capabilities to multi-agent embodied scenarios. We address this limitation by introducing a framework that enables LLM agents to learn and evolve both before and during test time, equipping them with environment-relevant knowledge for better planning and enhanced communication for improved cooperation. Inspired by centralized training with decentralized execution in multi-agent reinforcement learning, we propose a \textit{Learn as Individuals, Evolve as a Team (LIET)} paradigm for multi-agent LLMs adaptation. At the individual level, LLM agents learn a local utility function from exploratory datasets to better comprehend the embodied environment, which is then queried during test time to support informed decision-making. At the team level, LLM agents collaboratively and iteratively maintain and update a shared cooperation knowledge list based on new experiences, using it to guide more effective communication. By combining individual learning with team evolution, LIET enables comprehensive and flexible adaptation for LLM agents. Our experiments on Communicative Watch-And-Help and ThreeD-World Multi-Agent Transport benchmarks demonstrate that LIET, instantiated with both LLaMA and GPT-4o, outperforms existing baselines and exhibits strong cooperative planning abilities.

Liyuan Mao, Haoran Xu, Amy Zhang et al.

A generalizable reward model is crucial in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) as it enables correctly evaluating unseen prompt-response pairs. However, existing reward models lack this ability, as they are typically trained by increasing the reward gap between chosen and rejected responses, while overlooking the prompts that the responses are conditioned on. Consequently, when the trained reward model is evaluated on prompt-response pairs that lie outside the data distribution, neglecting the effect of prompts may result in poor generalization of the reward model. To address this issue, we decompose the reward value into two independent components: prompt-free reward and prompt-related reward. Prompt-free reward represents the evaluation that is determined only by responses, while the prompt-related reward reflects the reward that derives from both the prompt and the response. We extract these two components from an information-theoretic perspective, which requires no extra models. Subsequently, we propose a new reward learning algorithm by prioritizing data samples based on their prompt-free reward values. Through toy examples, we demonstrate that the extracted prompt-free and prompt-related rewards effectively characterize two parts of the reward model. Further, standard evaluations show that our method improves both the alignment performance and the generalization capability of the reward model.

Qiaosheng Zhang, Chenjia Bai, Shuyue Hu et al.

This work designs and analyzes a novel set of algorithms for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) based on the principle of information-directed sampling (IDS). These algorithms draw inspiration from foundational concepts in information theory, and are proven to be sample efficient in MARL settings such as two-player zero-sum Markov games (MGs) and multi-player general-sum MGs. For episodic two-player zero-sum MGs, we present three sample-efficient algorithms for learning Nash equilibrium. The basic algorithm, referred to as MAIDS, employs an asymmetric learning structure where the max-player first solves a minimax optimization problem based on the joint information ratio of the joint policy, and the min-player then minimizes the marginal information ratio with the max-player's policy fixed. Theoretical analyses show that it achieves a Bayesian regret of tilde{O}(sqrt{K}) for K episodes. To reduce the computational load of MAIDS, we develop an improved algorithm called Reg-MAIDS, which has the same Bayesian regret bound while enjoying less computational complexity. Moreover, by leveraging the flexibility of IDS principle in choosing the learning target, we propose two methods for constructing compressed environments based on rate-distortion theory, upon which we develop an algorithm Compressed-MAIDS wherein the learning target is a compressed environment. Finally, we extend Reg-MAIDS to multi-player general-sum MGs and prove that it can learn either the Nash equilibrium or coarse correlated equilibrium in a sample efficient manner.

Jinrui Han, Weiji Xie, Jiakun Zheng et al.

Learning versatile whole-body skills by tracking various human motions is a fundamental step toward general-purpose humanoid robots. This task is particularly challenging because a single policy must master a broad repertoire of motion skills while ensuring stability over long-horizon sequences. To this end, we present VMS, a unified whole-body controller that enables humanoid robots to learn diverse and dynamic behaviors within a single policy. Our framework integrates a hybrid tracking objective that balances local motion fidelity with global trajectory consistency, and an Orthogonal Mixture-of-Experts (OMoE) architecture that encourages skill specialization while enhancing generalization across motions. A segment-level tracking reward is further introduced to relax rigid step-wise matching, enhancing robustness when handling global displacements and transient inaccuracies. We validate VMS extensively in both simulation and real-world experiments, demonstrating accurate imitation of dynamic skills, stable performance over minute-long sequences, and strong generalization to unseen motions. These results highlight the potential of VMS as a scalable foundation for versatile humanoid whole-body control. The project page is available at https://kungfubot2-humanoid.github.io.

Chenyou Fan, Fangzheng Yan, Chenjia Bai et al.

Learning a generalizable bimanual manipulation policy is extremely challenging for embodied agents due to the large action space and the need for coordinated arm movements. Existing approaches rely on Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to acquire bimanual policies. However, transferring knowledge from single-arm datasets or pre-trained VLA models often fails to generalize effectively, primarily due to the scarcity of bimanual data and the fundamental differences between single-arm and bimanual manipulation. In this paper, we propose a novel bimanual foundation policy by fine-tuning the leading text-to-video models to predict robot trajectories and training a lightweight diffusion policy for action generation. Given the lack of embodied knowledge in text-to-video models, we introduce a two-stage paradigm that fine-tunes independent text-to-flow and flow-to-video models derived from a pre-trained text-to-video model. Specifically, optical flow serves as an intermediate variable, providing a concise representation of subtle movements between images. The text-to-flow model predicts optical flow to concretize the intent of language instructions, and the flow-to-video model leverages this flow for fine-grained video prediction. Our method mitigates the ambiguity of language in single-stage text-to-video prediction and significantly reduces the robot-data requirement by avoiding direct use of low-level actions. In experiments, we collect high-quality manipulation data for real dual-arm robot, and the results of simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Changhong Wang, Xudong Yu, Chenjia Bai et al.

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), training a policy from scratch with online experiences can be inefficient because of the difficulties in exploration. Recently, offline RL provides a promising solution by giving an initialized offline policy, which can be refined through online interactions. However, existing approaches primarily perform offline and online learning in the same task, without considering the task generalization problem in offline-to-online adaptation. In real-world applications, it is common that we only have an offline dataset from a specific task while aiming for fast online-adaptation for several tasks. To address this problem, our work builds upon the investigation of successor representations for task generalization in online RL and extends the framework to incorporate offline-to-online learning. We demonstrate that the conventional paradigm using successor features cannot effectively utilize offline data and improve the performance for the new task by online fine-tuning. To mitigate this, we introduce a novel methodology that leverages offline data to acquire an ensemble of successor representations and subsequently constructs ensemble Q functions. This approach enables robust representation learning from datasets with different coverage and facilitates fast adaption of Q functions towards new tasks during the online fine-tuning phase. Extensive empirical evaluations provide compelling evidence showcasing the superior performance of our method in generalizing to diverse or even unseen tasks.

Shiyuan Yin, Chenjia Bai, Zihao Zhang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate advanced reasoning abilities, enabling robots to understand natural language instructions and generate high-level plans with appropriate grounding. However, LLM hallucinations present a significant challenge, often leading to overconfident yet potentially misaligned or unsafe plans. While researchers have explored uncertainty estimation to improve the reliability of LLM-based planning, existing studies have not sufficiently differentiated between epistemic and intrinsic uncertainty, limiting the effectiveness of uncertainty estimation. In this paper, we present Combined Uncertainty estimation for Reliable Embodied planning (CURE), which decomposes the uncertainty into epistemic and intrinsic uncertainty, each estimated separately. Furthermore, epistemic uncertainty is subdivided into task clarity and task familiarity for more accurate evaluation. The overall uncertainty assessments are obtained using random network distillation and multi-layer perceptron regression heads driven by LLM features. We validated our approach in two distinct experimental settings: kitchen manipulation and tabletop rearrangement experiments. The results show that, compared to existing methods, our approach yields uncertainty estimates that are more closely aligned with the actual execution outcomes.

Ting Xiao, Jiakun Zheng, Rushuai Yang et al.

Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to discover diverse behaviors that can accelerate the learning of downstream tasks. Previous methods typically focus on entropy-based exploration or empowerment-driven skill learning. However, entropy-based exploration struggles in large-scale state spaces (e.g., images), and empowerment-based methods with Mutual Information (MI) estimations have limitations in state exploration. To address these challenges, we propose a novel skill discovery objective that maximizes the deviation of the state density of one skill from the explored regions of other skills, encouraging inter-skill state diversity similar to the initial MI objective. For state-density estimation, we construct a novel conditional autoencoder with soft modularization for different skill policies in high-dimensional space. Meanwhile, to incentivize intra-skill exploration, we formulate an intrinsic reward based on the learned autoencoder that resembles count-based exploration in a compact latent space. Through extensive experiments in challenging state and image-based tasks, we find our method learns meaningful skills and achieves superior performance in various downstream tasks.

Ting Xiao, Lei Shi, Yang Zhang et al.

Radiology Report Generation (RRG) is an important research topic for relieving radiologist' heavy workload. Existing RRG models mainly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) based on different model architectures using data pairs of radiological images and corresponding radiologist-annotated reports. Recent research has shifted focus to post-training improvements, aligning RRG model outputs with human preferences using reinforcement learning (RL). However, the limited data coverage of high-quality annotated data poses risks of overfitting and generalization. This paper proposes a novel Online Iterative Self-Alignment (OISA) method for RRG that consists of four stages: self-generation of diverse data, self-evaluation for multi-objective preference data,self-alignment for multi-objective optimization and self-iteration for further improvement. Our approach allows for generating varied reports tailored to specific clinical objectives, enhancing the overall performance of the RRG model iteratively. Unlike existing methods, our frame-work significantly increases data quality and optimizes performance through iterative multi-objective optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses previous approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple evaluation metrics.

Yang Zhang, Chenjia Bai, Bin Zhao et al.

Learning a world model for model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents can significantly improve the sample efficiency by learning policies in imagination. However, building a world model for Multi-Agent RL (MARL) can be particularly challenging due to the scalability issue in a centralized architecture arising from a large number of agents, and also the non-stationarity issue in a decentralized architecture stemming from the inter-dependency among agents. To address both challenges, we propose a novel world model for MARL that learns decentralized local dynamics for scalability, combined with a centralized representation aggregation from all agents. We cast the dynamics learning as an auto-regressive sequence modeling problem over discrete tokens by leveraging the expressive Transformer architecture, in order to model complex local dynamics across different agents and provide accurate and consistent long-term imaginations. As the first pioneering Transformer-based world model for multi-agent systems, we introduce a Perceiver Transformer as an effective solution to enable centralized representation aggregation within this context. Results on Starcraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) show that it outperforms strong model-free approaches and existing model-based methods in both sample efficiency and overall performance.

Xudong Yu, Chenjia Bai, Hongyi Guo et al.

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) faces distributional shift and unreliable value estimation, especially for out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. To address this, existing uncertainty-based methods penalize the value function with uncertainty quantification and demand numerous ensemble networks, posing computational challenges and suboptimal outcomes. In this paper, we introduce a novel strategy employing diverse randomized value functions to estimate the posterior distribution of $Q$-values. It provides robust uncertainty quantification and estimates lower confidence bounds (LCB) of $Q$-values. By applying moderate value penalties for OOD actions, our method fosters a provably pessimistic approach. We also emphasize on diversity within randomized value functions and enhance efficiency by introducing a diversity regularization method, reducing the requisite number of networks. These modules lead to reliable value estimation and efficient policy learning from offline data. Theoretical analysis shows that our method recovers the provably efficient LCB-penalty under linear MDP assumptions. Extensive empirical results also demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms baseline methods in terms of performance and parametric efficiency.

Haoran He, Peilin Wu, Chenjia Bai et al.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has recently achieved remarkable success in robotic control. However, most works in RL operate in simulated environments where privileged knowledge (e.g., dynamics, surroundings, terrains) is readily available. Conversely, in real-world scenarios, robot agents usually rely solely on local states (e.g., proprioceptive feedback of robot joints) to select actions, leading to a significant sim-to-real gap. Existing methods address this gap by either gradually reducing the reliance on privileged knowledge or performing a two-stage policy imitation. However, we argue that these methods are limited in their ability to fully leverage the available privileged knowledge, resulting in suboptimal performance. In this paper, we formulate the sim-to-real gap as an information bottleneck problem and therefore propose a novel privileged knowledge distillation method called the Historical Information Bottleneck (HIB). In particular, HIB learns a privileged knowledge representation from historical trajectories by capturing the underlying changeable dynamic information. Theoretical analysis shows that the learned privileged knowledge representation helps reduce the value discrepancy between the oracle and learned policies. Empirical experiments on both simulated and real-world tasks demonstrate that HIB yields improved generalizability compared to previous methods. Videos of real-world experiments are available at https://sites.google.com/view/history-ib .

Haoran He, Chenjia Bai, Kang Xu et al.

Diffusion models have demonstrated highly-expressive generative capabilities in vision and NLP. Recent studies in reinforcement learning (RL) have shown that diffusion models are also powerful in modeling complex policies or trajectories in offline datasets. However, these works have been limited to single-task settings where a generalist agent capable of addressing multi-task predicaments is absent. In this paper, we aim to investigate the effectiveness of a single diffusion model in modeling large-scale multi-task offline data, which can be challenging due to diverse and multimodal data distribution. Specifically, we propose Multi-Task Diffusion Model (\textsc{MTDiff}), a diffusion-based method that incorporates Transformer backbones and prompt learning for generative planning and data synthesis in multi-task offline settings. \textsc{MTDiff} leverages vast amounts of knowledge available in multi-task data and performs implicit knowledge sharing among tasks. For generative planning, we find \textsc{MTDiff} outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms across 50 tasks on Meta-World and 8 maps on Maze2D. For data synthesis, \textsc{MTDiff} generates high-quality data for testing tasks given a single demonstration as a prompt, which enhances the low-quality datasets for even unseen tasks.

Kang Xu, Chenjia Bai, Xiaoteng Ma et al.

Generalizing policies across different domains with dynamics mismatch poses a significant challenge in reinforcement learning. For example, a robot learns the policy in a simulator, but when it is deployed in the real world, the dynamics of the environment may be different. Given the source and target domain with dynamics mismatch, we consider the online dynamics adaptation problem, in which case the agent can access sufficient source domain data while online interactions with the target domain are limited. Existing research has attempted to solve the problem from the dynamics discrepancy perspective. In this work, we reveal the limitations of these methods and explore the problem from the value difference perspective via a novel insight on the value consistency across domains. Specifically, we present the Value-Guided Data Filtering (VGDF) algorithm, which selectively shares transitions from the source domain based on the proximity of paired value targets across the two domains. Empirical results on various environments with kinematic and morphology shifts demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared to prior approaches.

Kang Xu, Chenjia Bai, Shuang Qiu et al.

Leveraging learned strategies in unfamiliar scenarios is fundamental to human intelligence. In reinforcement learning, rationally reusing the policies acquired from other tasks or human experts is critical for tackling problems that are difficult to learn from scratch. In this work, we present a framework called Selective Myopic bEhavior Control~(SMEC), which results from the insight that the short-term behaviors of prior policies are sharable across tasks. By evaluating the behaviors of prior policies via a hybrid value function architecture, SMEC adaptively aggregates the sharable short-term behaviors of prior policies and the long-term behaviors of the task policy, leading to coordinated decisions. Empirical results on a collection of manipulation and locomotion tasks demonstrate that SMEC outperforms existing methods, and validate the ability of SMEC to leverage related prior policies.

Rushuai Yang, Chenjia Bai, Hongyi Guo et al.

In reinforcement learning, unsupervised skill discovery aims to learn diverse skills without extrinsic rewards. Previous methods discover skills by maximizing the mutual information (MI) between states and skills. However, such an MI objective tends to learn simple and static skills and may hinder exploration. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised skill discovery method through contrastive learning among behaviors, which makes the agent produce similar behaviors for the same skill and diverse behaviors for different skills. Under mild assumptions, our objective maximizes the MI between different behaviors based on the same skill, which serves as an upper bound of the previous MI objective. Meanwhile, our method implicitly increases the state entropy to obtain better state coverage. We evaluate our method on challenging mazes and continuous control tasks. The results show that our method generates diverse and far-reaching skills, and also obtains competitive performance in downstream tasks compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Chenjia Bai, Lingxiao Wang, Zhuoran Yang et al.

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn policies from previously collected datasets without exploring the environment. Directly applying off-policy algorithms to offline RL usually fails due to the extrapolation error caused by the out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. Previous methods tackle such problem by penalizing the Q-values of OOD actions or constraining the trained policy to be close to the behavior policy. Nevertheless, such methods typically prevent the generalization of value functions beyond the offline data and also lack precise characterization of OOD data. In this paper, we propose Pessimistic Bootstrapping for offline RL (PBRL), a purely uncertainty-driven offline algorithm without explicit policy constraints. Specifically, PBRL conducts uncertainty quantification via the disagreement of bootstrapped Q-functions, and performs pessimistic updates by penalizing the value function based on the estimated uncertainty. To tackle the extrapolating error, we further propose a novel OOD sampling method. We show that such OOD sampling and pessimistic bootstrapping yields provable uncertainty quantifier in linear MDPs, thus providing the theoretical underpinning for PBRL. Extensive experiments on D4RL benchmark show that PBRL has better performance compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Zhihong Deng, Zuyue Fu, Lingxiao Wang et al.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) harnesses the power of massive datasets for resolving sequential decision problems. Most existing papers only discuss defending against out-of-distribution (OOD) actions while we investigate a broader issue, the false correlations between epistemic uncertainty and decision-making, an essential factor that causes suboptimality. In this paper, we propose falSe COrrelation REduction (SCORE) for offline RL, a practically effective and theoretically provable algorithm. We empirically show that SCORE achieves the SoTA performance with 3.1x acceleration on various tasks in a standard benchmark (D4RL). The proposed algorithm introduces an annealing behavior cloning regularizer to help produce a high-quality estimation of uncertainty which is critical for eliminating false correlations from suboptimality. Theoretically, we justify the rationality of the proposed method and prove its convergence to the optimal policy with a sublinear rate under mild assumptions.

Chenjia Bai, Lingxiao Wang, Lei Han et al.

Exploration methods based on pseudo-count of transitions or curiosity of dynamics have achieved promising results in solving reinforcement learning with sparse rewards. However, such methods are usually sensitive to environmental dynamics-irrelevant information, e.g., white-noise. To handle such dynamics-irrelevant information, we propose a Dynamic Bottleneck (DB) model, which attains a dynamics-relevant representation based on the information-bottleneck principle. Based on the DB model, we further propose DB-bonus, which encourages the agent to explore state-action pairs with high information gain. We establish theoretical connections between the proposed DB-bonus, the upper confidence bound (UCB) for linear case, and the visiting count for tabular case. We evaluate the proposed method on Atari suits with dynamics-irrelevant noises. Our experiments show that exploration with DB bonus outperforms several state-of-the-art exploration methods in noisy environments.

Jianye Hao, Tianpei Yang, Hongyao Tang et al.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Deep Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) have achieved significant successes across a wide range of domains, including game AI, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and so on. However, DRL and deep MARL agents are widely known to be sample inefficient that millions of interactions are usually needed even for relatively simple problem settings, thus preventing the wide application and deployment in real-industry scenarios. One bottleneck challenge behind is the well-known exploration problem, i.e., how efficiently exploring the environment and collecting informative experiences that could benefit policy learning towards the optimal ones. This problem becomes more challenging in complex environments with sparse rewards, noisy distractions, long horizons, and non-stationary co-learners. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey on existing exploration methods for both single-agent and multi-agent RL. We start the survey by identifying several key challenges to efficient exploration. Beyond the above two main branches, we also include other notable exploration methods with different ideas and techniques. In addition to algorithmic analysis, we provide a comprehensive and unified empirical comparison of different exploration methods for DRL on a set of commonly used benchmarks. According to our algorithmic and empirical investigation, we finally summarize the open problems of exploration in DRL and deep MARL and point out a few future directions.

Chenjia Bai, Lingxiao Wang, Lei Han et al.

One principled approach for provably efficient exploration is incorporating the upper confidence bound (UCB) into the value function as a bonus. However, UCB is specified to deal with linear and tabular settings and is incompatible with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). In this paper, we propose a principled exploration method for DRL through Optimistic Bootstrapping and Backward Induction (OB2I). OB2I constructs a general-purpose UCB-bonus through non-parametric bootstrap in DRL. The UCB-bonus estimates the epistemic uncertainty of state-action pairs for optimistic exploration. We build theoretical connections between the proposed UCB-bonus and the LSVI-UCB in a linear setting. We propagate future uncertainty in a time-consistent manner through episodic backward update, which exploits the theoretical advantage and empirically improves the sample-efficiency. Our experiments in the MNIST maze and Atari suite suggest that OB2I outperforms several state-of-the-art exploration approaches.

Chenjia Bai, Peng Liu, Kaiyu Liu et al.

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks where extrinsic rewards from environments are sparse or even totally disregarded. Significant advances based on intrinsic motivation show promising results in simple environments but often get stuck in environments with multimodal and stochastic dynamics. In this work, we propose a variational dynamic model based on the conditional variational inference to model the multimodality and stochasticity. We consider the environmental state-action transition as a conditional generative process by generating the next-state prediction under the condition of the current state, action, and latent variable, which provides a better understanding of the dynamics and leads a better performance in exploration. We derive an upper bound of the negative log-likelihood of the environmental transition and use such an upper bound as the intrinsic reward for exploration, which allows the agent to learn skills by self-supervised exploration without observing extrinsic rewards. We evaluate the proposed method on several image-based simulation tasks and a real robotic manipulating task. Our method outperforms several state-of-the-art environment model-based exploration approaches.