UniIntervene++: An Adaptive Intervention Agent for Efficient Real-World Reinforcement Learning

Yudong Lin, Haoyuan Deng, Zhuoxuan Yuan, Zaijia Yang, Yuanjiang Xue +1

Online reinforcement learning (RL) enables robot policies to improve through physical interaction, but the assistance they require changes as their competence evolves. Existing intervention strategies based on offline estimates or fixed decision rules can therefore become mismatched to the current policy. To address this, we propose UniIntervene++, an adaptive intervention agent that learns to allocate control between autonomous execution and heterogeneous assisted behaviors during online RL. Specifically, UniIntervene++ first formulates the evolving RL policy, trajectory correction, and a task-structured CodePolicy as Options in a unified semi-Markov decision process and learns their relative values online. Building on this, competence-adaptive intervention periodically probes the RL policy through unassisted execution, keeping control allocation responsive to its evolving capability. Finally, coupled experience learning allows assisted behaviors to improve the RL policy, whose evolving outcomes in turn reshape future intervention decisions. In this way, UniIntervene++ jointly determines when to intervene, how to intervene, and when to return control as the RL policy improves.…