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Residual Policy Learning

13 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

13 Pith papers citing it
abstract

We present Residual Policy Learning (RPL): a simple method for improving nondifferentiable policies using model-free deep reinforcement learning. RPL thrives in complex robotic manipulation tasks where good but imperfect controllers are available. In these tasks, reinforcement learning from scratch remains data-inefficient or intractable, but learning a residual on top of the initial controller can yield substantial improvements. We study RPL in six challenging MuJoCo tasks involving partial observability, sensor noise, model misspecification, and controller miscalibration. For initial controllers, we consider both hand-designed policies and model-predictive controllers with known or learned transition models. By combining learning with control algorithms, RPL can perform long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks for which reinforcement learning alone fails. Moreover, we find that RPL consistently and substantially improves on the initial controllers. We argue that RPL is a promising approach for combining the complementary strengths of deep reinforcement learning and robotic control, pushing the boundaries of what either can achieve independently. Video and code at https://k-r-allen.github.io/residual-policy-learning/.

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2026 13

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representative citing papers

When to Act, Ask, or Learn: Uncertainty-Aware Policy Steering

cs.RO · 2026-02-25 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

UPS framework uses conformal prediction to calibrate VLM verifiers for choosing between high-confidence action execution, natural language task queries, or policy interventions, then applies residual learning from interventions to continually improve the base policy with minimal feedback.

SPAR: Support-Preserving Action Rectification

cs.LG · 2026-05-27 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

SPAR anchors policy learning to a frozen BC policy for residual rectification and introduces latent self-imitation to eliminate manifold drift, achieving SOTA on D4RL.

Fisher Decorator: Refining Flow Policy via a Local Transport Map

cs.LG · 2026-04-20 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Fisher Decorator refines flow policies in offline RL via a local transport map and Fisher-matrix quadratic approximation of the KL constraint, yielding controllable error near the optimum and SOTA benchmark results.

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