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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09335 |
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| _version_ | 1866917477864177664 |
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| author | Dash, Shalley |
| author_facet | Dash, Shalley |
| contents | Sparse goal-conditioned reinforcement learning can produce policies whose failures are hidden by aggregate success rates. We analyze trained goal-conditioned value policies through the deterministic functional graphs induced by greedy evaluation: for each goal, every state maps to a single successor, decomposing behavior into attractors and basins. This reveals a local-to-global structure in learned policies. We define local goal support (LGS), a one-step statistic measuring the fraction of valid neighboring states whose greedy successor is the goal. In deterministic sparse GridWorlds, zero LGS exactly precludes goal entry from non-goal starts. Empirically, weak LGS is a strong diagnostic of goal-level failure across update rules, curricula, larger grids, and bottleneck geometries: the fixed rule LGS <= 0.5 identifies low-success goals with precision 0.921, recall 0.929, and F1 0.925 in the main 8x8 TD setting, with similar performance across variants. However, local support is not sufficient for global success: some supported goals still fail because distant states are captured by competing attractors or fragmented basin structure. We therefore introduce a compact post-hoc taxonomy of policy-induced graphs -- goal-dominant, competitor-dominated, partial/contested, and fragmented -- to characterize residual failure modes beyond local support. These results show that sparse GCRL failures can be understood as structured policy-induced dynamics, and that local one-step policy structure provides a cheap post-training diagnostic for goal-level failure. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_09335 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Functional Graphs for Predicting and Explaining Goal Failure in Sparse Goal-Conditioned RL Dash, Shalley Machine Learning 68T05, 37M05, 05C82 Sparse goal-conditioned reinforcement learning can produce policies whose failures are hidden by aggregate success rates. We analyze trained goal-conditioned value policies through the deterministic functional graphs induced by greedy evaluation: for each goal, every state maps to a single successor, decomposing behavior into attractors and basins. This reveals a local-to-global structure in learned policies. We define local goal support (LGS), a one-step statistic measuring the fraction of valid neighboring states whose greedy successor is the goal. In deterministic sparse GridWorlds, zero LGS exactly precludes goal entry from non-goal starts. Empirically, weak LGS is a strong diagnostic of goal-level failure across update rules, curricula, larger grids, and bottleneck geometries: the fixed rule LGS <= 0.5 identifies low-success goals with precision 0.921, recall 0.929, and F1 0.925 in the main 8x8 TD setting, with similar performance across variants. However, local support is not sufficient for global success: some supported goals still fail because distant states are captured by competing attractors or fragmented basin structure. We therefore introduce a compact post-hoc taxonomy of policy-induced graphs -- goal-dominant, competitor-dominated, partial/contested, and fragmented -- to characterize residual failure modes beyond local support. These results show that sparse GCRL failures can be understood as structured policy-induced dynamics, and that local one-step policy structure provides a cheap post-training diagnostic for goal-level failure. |
| title | Functional Graphs for Predicting and Explaining Goal Failure in Sparse Goal-Conditioned RL |
| topic | Machine Learning 68T05, 37M05, 05C82 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09335 |