Evaluating robot policies before deployment typically requires producing new trajectories through real-world execution, simulators, or learned world models. These rollout-based approaches impose infrastructure requirements; simulator and world-model evaluators additionally face prediction errors that can compound over the evaluation horizon. In this paper, we study off-policy evaluation as an alternative to rollout-based robot-policy evaluation methods. Specifically, we introduce RoboFQE, an evaluator that estimates the discounted expected return of a target policy from offline robot trajectories without estimating a behavior-policy density, combining fitted Q-evaluation with a pretrained vision foundation model and learned terminal success annotation to bridge the gap between standard OPE benchmarks and continuous-control visual manipulation. Controlled experiments across simulated and real-world manipulation tasks show that RoboFQE produces accurate discounted-return estimates and preserves policy rankings even on long-horizon manipulation tasks where video world-model evaluators are degraded by autoregressive prediction errors. Ablation experiments show that pretrained vision encoders substantially outperform from-scratch alternatives, particularly on long-horizon tasks, and that learned terminal success annotation enables evaluation without ground-truth reward labels with only slight reduction of accuracy.
Robo-ValueRL: Reliable Value Estimation for Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning
Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学高瓴人工智能学院）；Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics（北京人形机器人创新中心）；Beijing Forestry University（北京林业大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
Model-based algorithms, which learn a dynamics model from logged experience and perform some sort of pessimistic planning under the learned model, have emerged as a promising paradigm for offline reinforcement learning (offline RL). However, practical variants of such model-based algorithms rely on explicit uncertainty quantification for incorporating pessimism. Uncertainty estimation with complex models, such as deep neural networks, can be difficult and unreliable. We overcome this limitation by developing a new model-based offline RL algorithm, COMBO, that regularizes the value function on …
Reinforcement learning (RL) has been shown to be effective at learning control from experience. However, RL typically requires a large amount of online interaction with the environment. This limits its applicability to real-world settings, such as in robotics, where such interaction is expensive. In this work we investigate ways to minimize online interactions in a target task, by reusing a suboptimal policy we might have access to, for example from training on related prior tasks, or in simulation. To this end, we develop two RL algorithms that can speed up training by using not only the acti…
Learning robotic tasks in the real world is still highly challenging and effective practical solutions remain to be found. Traditional methods used in this area are imitation learning and reinforcement learning, but they both have limitations when applied to real robots. Combining reinforcement learning with pre-collected demonstrations is a promising approach that can help in learning control policies to solve robotic tasks. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that uses novel techniques to leverage offline expert data using offline and online training to obtain faster convergence and impro…
VLM-SAFE: Vision-Language Model-Guided Safety-Aware Reinforcement Learning with World Models for Autonomous Driving
Lyles School of Civil and Construction Engineering, Purdue University（普渡大学莱尔斯土木与建筑工程学院）；Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校土木与环境工程系）；Google（谷歌）
