XQCfD: Accelerating Fast Actor-Critic Algorithms with Prior Data and Prior Policies

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Palenicek, Daniel, Vogt, Florian, Watson, Joe, Posner, Ingmar, Kragic, Danica, Peters, Jan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910209431044096
author Palenicek, Daniel
Vogt, Florian
Watson, Joe
Posner, Ingmar
Kragic, Danica
Peters, Jan
author_facet Palenicek, Daniel
Vogt, Florian
Watson, Joe
Posner, Ingmar
Kragic, Danica
Peters, Jan
contents For reinforcement learning in the real world online exploration is expensive A common practice in robotic reinforcement learning is to incorporate additional data to improve sample efficiency Expert demonstration data is often crucial for solving hard exploration tasks with sparse rewards While prior data is used to augment experience and pretrain models we show that the design of existing algorithms fails to achieve the sample efficiency that is possible in this setting due to a failure to use pretrained policies effectively We propose XQCfD which extends the sample-efficient XQC actor-critic to learn from demonstrations using augmented replay buffers pretrained policies and stationary policy architectures designed to avoid rapidly unlearning the strong initial policy like prior works We show our stationary network architecture enables policy improvement out-of-distribution better than standard network architectures due to its higher entropy predictions XQCfD achieves state of the art performance across a range of complex manipulation tasks with sparse rewards from the popular Adroit Robomimic and MimicGen benchmarks -- notably with a low update-to-data ratio and no ensemble networks
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_10734
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle XQCfD: Accelerating Fast Actor-Critic Algorithms with Prior Data and Prior Policies
Palenicek, Daniel
Vogt, Florian
Watson, Joe
Posner, Ingmar
Kragic, Danica
Peters, Jan
Machine Learning
For reinforcement learning in the real world online exploration is expensive A common practice in robotic reinforcement learning is to incorporate additional data to improve sample efficiency Expert demonstration data is often crucial for solving hard exploration tasks with sparse rewards While prior data is used to augment experience and pretrain models we show that the design of existing algorithms fails to achieve the sample efficiency that is possible in this setting due to a failure to use pretrained policies effectively We propose XQCfD which extends the sample-efficient XQC actor-critic to learn from demonstrations using augmented replay buffers pretrained policies and stationary policy architectures designed to avoid rapidly unlearning the strong initial policy like prior works We show our stationary network architecture enables policy improvement out-of-distribution better than standard network architectures due to its higher entropy predictions XQCfD achieves state of the art performance across a range of complex manipulation tasks with sparse rewards from the popular Adroit Robomimic and MimicGen benchmarks -- notably with a low update-to-data ratio and no ensemble networks
title XQCfD: Accelerating Fast Actor-Critic Algorithms with Prior Data and Prior Policies
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10734