Glen Berseth

RoboArena: Distributed Real-World Evaluation of Generalist Robot Policies

Pranav Atreya

Karl Pertsch

Tony Lee

Moo Jin Kim

Arhan Jain

Artur Kuramshin

Cyrus Neary

Edward S. Hu

Kanav Arora

Kirsty Ellis

Luca Macesanu

Matthew Leonard

Meedeum Cho

Özgür Aslan

Shivin Dass

Tony Wang

Xingfang Yuan

Abhishek Gupta

Dinesh Jayaraman

Glen Berseth … (voir 6 de plus)

Kostas Daniilidis

Roberto Martín-Martín

Youngwoon Lee

Percy Liang

Chelsea Finn

Sergey Levine

2025-10-07

Proceedings of The 8th Conference on Robot Learning (publié)

RoboArena: Distributed Real-World Evaluation of Generalist Robot Policies

Pranav Atreya

Karl Pertsch

Tony Lee

Moo Jin Kim

Arhan Jain

Artur Kuramshin

Cyrus Neary

Edward S. Hu

Kanav Arora

Kirsty Ellis

Luca Macesanu

Matthew Leonard

Meedeum Cho

Özgür Aslan

Shivin Dass

Tony Wang

Xingfang Yuan

Abhishek Gupta

Dinesh Jayaraman

Glen Berseth … (voir 6 de plus)

Kostas Daniilidis

Roberto Martín-Martín

Youngwoon Lee

Percy Liang

Chelsea Finn

Sergey Levine

Comprehensive, unbiased, and comparable evaluation of modern generalist policies is uniquely challenging: existing approaches for robot benc… (voir plus)hmarking typically rely on heavy standardization, either by specifying fixed evaluation tasks and environments, or by hosting centralized "robot challenges", and do not readily scale to evaluating generalist policies across a broad range of tasks and environments. In this work, we propose RoboArena, a new approach for scalable evaluation of generalist robot policies in the real world. Instead of standardizing evaluations around fixed tasks, environments, or locations, we propose to crowd-source evaluations across a distributed network of evaluators. Importantly, evaluators can freely choose the tasks and environments they evaluate on, enabling easy scaling of diversity, but they are required to perform double-blind evaluations over pairs of policies. Then, by aggregating preference feedback from pairwise comparisons across diverse tasks and environments, we can derive a ranking of policies. We instantiate our approach across a network of evaluators at seven academic institutions using the DROID robot platform. Through more than 600 pairwise real-robot evaluation episodes across seven generalist policies, we demonstrate that our crowd-sourced approach can more accurately rank the performance of existing generalist policies than conventional, centralized evaluation approaches, while being more scalable, resilient, and trustworthy. We open our evaluation network to the community and hope that it can enable more accessible comparisons of generalist robot policies.

2025-10-07

Proceedings of The 8th Conference on Robot Learning (publié)

Mitigating Plasticity Loss in Continual Reinforcement Learning by Reducing Churn

Hongyao Tang

Pablo Samuel Castro

Aaron Courville

Plasticity, or the ability of an agent to adapt to new tasks, environments, or distributions, is crucial for continual learning. In this pap… (voir plus)er, we study the loss of plasticity in deep continual RL from the lens of churn: network output variability induced by the data in each training batch. We demonstrate that (1) the loss of plasticity is accompanied by the exacerbation of churn due to the gradual rank decrease of the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) matrix; (2) reducing churn helps prevent rank collapse and adjusts the step size of regular RL gradients adaptively. Moreover, we introduce Continual Churn Approximated Reduction (C-CHAIN) and demonstrate it improves learning performance and outperforms baselines in a diverse range of continual learning environments on OpenAI Gym Control, ProcGen, DeepMind Control Suite, and MinAtar benchmarks.

2025-10-06

Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (publié)

Mitigating Plasticity Loss in Continual Reinforcement Learning by Reducing Churn

Hongyao Tang

Pablo Samuel Castro

Aaron Courville

Plasticity, or the ability of an agent to adapt to new tasks, environments, or distributions, is crucial for continual learning. In this pap… (voir plus)er, we study the loss of plasticity in deep continual RL from the lens of churn: network output variability for out-of-batch data induced by mini-batch training. We demonstrate that (1) the loss of plasticity is accompanied by the exacerbation of churn due to the gradual rank decrease of the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) matrix; (2) reducing churn helps prevent rank collapse and adjusts the step size of regular RL gradients adaptively. Moreover, we introduce Continual Churn Approximated Reduction (C-CHAIN) and demonstrate it improves learning performance and outperforms baselines in a diverse range of continual learning environments on OpenAI Gym Control, ProcGen, DeepMind Control Suite, and MinAtar benchmarks.

2025-10-06

Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (publié)

Outsourced diffusion sampling: Efficient posterior inference in latent spaces of generative models

Any well-behaved generative model over a variable …

2025-10-06

Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (publié)

Outsourced Diffusion Sampling: Efficient Posterior Inference in Latent Spaces of Generative Models

Any well-behaved generative model over a variable …

2025-10-06

Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (publié)

Recursive Self-Aggregation Unlocks Deep Thinking in Large Language Models

Brian R. Bartoldson

Bhavya Kailkhura

Moksh J. Jain

Test-time scaling methods improve the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by increasing the amount of compute used during inference… (voir plus) to make a prediction. Inference-time compute can be scaled in parallel by choosing among multiple independent solutions or sequentially through self-refinement. We propose Recursive Self-Aggregation (RSA), a test-time scaling method inspired by evolutionary methods that combines the benefits of both parallel and sequential scaling. Each step of RSA refines a population of candidate reasoning chains through aggregation of subsets to yield a population of improved solutions, which are then used as the candidate pool for the next iteration. RSA exploits the rich information embedded in the reasoning chains -- not just the final answers -- and enables bootstrapping from partially correct intermediate steps within different chains of thought. Empirically, RSA delivers substantial performance gains with increasing compute budgets across diverse tasks, model families and sizes. Notably, RSA enables Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 to achieve competitive performance with larger reasoning models, including DeepSeek-R1 and o3-mini (high), while outperforming purely parallel and sequential scaling strategies across AIME-25, HMMT-25, Reasoning Gym, LiveCodeBench-v6, and SuperGPQA. We further demonstrate that training the model to combine solutions via a novel aggregation-aware reinforcement learning approach yields significant performance gains. Code available at https://github.com/HyperPotatoNeo/RSA.

2025-09-30

ArXiv (prépublication)

Recursive Self-Aggregation Unlocks Deep Thinking in Large Language Models

Brian R. Bartoldson

Bhavya Kailkhura

Moksh J. Jain

Test-time scaling methods improve the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by increasing the amount of compute used during inference… (voir plus) to make a prediction. Inference-time compute can be scaled in parallel by choosing among multiple independent solutions or sequentially through self-refinement. We propose Recursive Self-Aggregation (RSA), a test-time scaling method inspired by evolutionary methods that combines the benefits of both parallel and sequential scaling. Each step of RSA refines a population of candidate reasoning chains through aggregation of subsets to yield a population of improved solutions, which are then used as the candidate pool for the next iteration. RSA exploits the rich information embedded in the reasoning chains -- not just the final answers -- and enables bootstrapping from partially correct intermediate steps within different chains of thought. Empirically, RSA delivers substantial performance gains with increasing compute budgets across diverse tasks, model families and sizes. Notably, RSA enables Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 to achieve competitive performance with larger reasoning models, including DeepSeek-R1 and o3-mini (high), while outperforming purely parallel and sequential scaling strategies across AIME-25, HMMT-25, Reasoning Gym, LiveCodeBench-v6, and SuperGPQA. We further demonstrate that training the model to combine solutions via a novel aggregation-aware reinforcement learning approach yields significant performance gains. Code available at https://github.com/HyperPotatoNeo/RSA.

2025-09-30

ArXiv (prépublication)

Recursive Self-Aggregation Unlocks Deep Thinking in Large Language Models

Brian R. Bartoldson

Bhavya Kailkhura

Moksh J. Jain

Test-time scaling methods improve the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by increasing the amount of compute used during inference… (voir plus) to make a prediction. Inference-time compute can be scaled in parallel by choosing among multiple independent solutions or sequentially through self-refinement. We propose Recursive Self-Aggregation (RSA), a test-time scaling method inspired by evolutionary methods that combines the benefits of both parallel and sequential scaling. Each step of RSA refines a population of candidate reasoning chains through aggregation of subsets to yield a population of improved solutions, which are then used as the candidate pool for the next iteration. RSA exploits the rich information embedded in the reasoning chains -- not just the final answers -- and enables bootstrapping from partially correct intermediate steps within different chains of thought. Empirically, RSA delivers substantial performance gains with increasing compute budgets across diverse tasks, model families and sizes. Notably, RSA enables Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 to achieve competitive performance with larger reasoning models, including DeepSeek-R1 and o3-mini (high), while outperforming purely parallel and sequential scaling strategies across AIME-25, HMMT-25, Reasoning Gym, LiveCodeBench-v6, and SuperGPQA. We further demonstrate that training the model to combine solutions via a novel aggregation-aware reinforcement learning approach yields significant performance gains. Code available at https://github.com/HyperPotatoNeo/RSA.

2025-09-30

ArXiv (prépublication)

Recursive Self-Aggregation Unlocks Deep Thinking in Large Language Models

Brian R. Bartoldson

Bhavya Kailkhura

Moksh J. Jain

Test-time scaling methods improve the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by increasing the amount of compute used during inference… (voir plus) to make a prediction. Inference-time compute can be scaled in parallel by choosing among multiple independent solutions or sequentially through self-refinement. We propose Recursive Self-Aggregation (RSA), a test-time scaling method inspired by evolutionary methods that combines the benefits of both parallel and sequential scaling. Each step of RSA refines a population of candidate reasoning chains through aggregation of subsets to yield a population of improved solutions, which are then used as the candidate pool for the next iteration. RSA exploits the rich information embedded in the reasoning chains -- not just the final answers -- and enables bootstrapping from partially correct intermediate steps within different chains of thought. Empirically, RSA delivers substantial performance gains with increasing compute budgets across diverse tasks, model families and sizes. Notably, RSA enables Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 to achieve competitive performance with larger reasoning models, including DeepSeek-R1 and o3-mini (high), while outperforming purely parallel and sequential scaling strategies across AIME-25, HMMT-25, Reasoning Gym, LiveCodeBench-v6, and SuperGPQA. We further demonstrate that training the model to combine solutions via a novel aggregation-aware reinforcement learning approach yields significant performance gains. Code available at https://github.com/HyperPotatoNeo/RSA.

2025-09-30

ArXiv (prépublication)

Stable Gradients for Stable Learning at Scale in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Roger Creus Castanyer

Johan Obando-Ceron

Scaling deep reinforcement learning networks is challenging and often results in degraded performance, yet the root causes of this failure m… (voir plus)ode remain poorly understood. Several recent works have proposed mechanisms to address this, but they are often complex and fail to highlight the causes underlying this difficulty. In this work, we conduct a series of empirical analyses which suggest that the combination of non-stationarity with gradient pathologies, due to suboptimal architectural choices, underlie the challenges of scale. We propose a series of direct interventions that stabilize gradient flow, enabling robust performance across a range of network depths and widths. Our interventions are simple to implement and compatible with well-established algorithms, and result in an effective mechanism that enables strong performance even at large scales. We validate our findings on a variety of agents and suites of environments.

2025-09-17

NeurIPS.cc/2025/Conference (spotlight)