Chunk-Guided Q-Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Song, Gwanwoo, Park, Kwanyoung, Lee, Youngwoon
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Song, Gwanwoo
Park, Kwanyoung
Lee, Youngwoon
author_facet Song, Gwanwoo
Park, Kwanyoung
Lee, Youngwoon
contents In offline reinforcement learning (RL), single-step temporal-difference (TD) learning can suffer from bootstrapping error accumulation over long horizons. Action-chunked TD methods mitigate this by backing up over multiple steps, but can introduce suboptimality by restricting the policy class to open-loop action sequences. To resolve this trade-off, we present Chunk-Guided Q-Learning (CGQ), a single-step TD algorithm that guides a fine-grained single-step critic by regularizing it toward a chunk-based critic trained using temporally extended backups. This reduces compounding error while preserving fine-grained value propagation. We theoretically show that CGQ attains tighter critic optimality bounds than either single-step or action-chunked TD learning alone. Empirically, CGQ achieves strong performance on challenging long-horizon OGBench tasks, often outperforming both single-step and action-chunked methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_13971
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Chunk-Guided Q-Learning
Song, Gwanwoo
Park, Kwanyoung
Lee, Youngwoon
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
In offline reinforcement learning (RL), single-step temporal-difference (TD) learning can suffer from bootstrapping error accumulation over long horizons. Action-chunked TD methods mitigate this by backing up over multiple steps, but can introduce suboptimality by restricting the policy class to open-loop action sequences. To resolve this trade-off, we present Chunk-Guided Q-Learning (CGQ), a single-step TD algorithm that guides a fine-grained single-step critic by regularizing it toward a chunk-based critic trained using temporally extended backups. This reduces compounding error while preserving fine-grained value propagation. We theoretically show that CGQ attains tighter critic optimality bounds than either single-step or action-chunked TD learning alone. Empirically, CGQ achieves strong performance on challenging long-horizon OGBench tasks, often outperforming both single-step and action-chunked methods.
title Chunk-Guided Q-Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13971