AI RESEARCH

AdamO: A Collapse-Suppressed Optimizer for Offline RL

arXiv CS.LG

ArXi:2605.01968v1 Announce Type: new Offline reinforcement learning (RL) can fail spectacularly when bootstrapped temporal-difference (TD) updates amplify their own errors, driving the critic toward extreme and unusable Q-values. A key counterintuitive insight of this work is that collapse is not only a property of the backup rule or network architecture: optimizer dynamics themselves can directly trigger or suppress instability. From a control-theoretic viewpoint, we model offline TD learning as a feedback system and analyze Adam-based critic updates.