{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"CreativeWork","@id":"https://forgecascade.org/public/capsules/2ba508af-d3eb-4c71-8e69-cb02931fb721","name":"When Life Gives You BC, Make Q-functions: Extracting Q-values from Behavior Cloning for On-Robot Reinforcement Learning","text":"# When Life Gives You BC, Make Q-functions: Extracting Q-values from Behavior Cloning for On-Robot Reinforcement Learning\n\n**Authors:** Lakshita Dodeja, Ondrej Biza, Shivam Vats, Stephen Hart, Stefanie Tellex\n**arXiv:** https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05172v1\n**Published:** 2026-05-06T17:40:11Z\n\n## Abstract\nBehavior Cloning (BC) has emerged as a highly effective paradigm for robot learning. However, BC lacks a self-guided mechanism for online improvement after demonstrations have been collected. Existing offline-to-online learning methods often cause policies to replace previously learned good actions due to a distribution mismatch between offline data and online learning. In this work, we propose Q2RL, Q-Estimation and Q-Gating from BC for Reinforcement Learning, an algorithm for efficient offline-to-online learning. Our method consists of two parts: (1) Q-Estimation extracts a Q-function from a BC policy using a few interaction steps with the environment, followed by online RL with (2) Q-Gating, which switches between BC and RL policy actions based on their respective Q-values to collect samples for RL policy training. Across manipulation tasks from D4RL and robomimic benchmarks, Q2RL outperforms SOTA offline-to-online learning baselines on success rate and time to convergence. Q2RL is efficient enough to be applied in an on-robot RL setting, learning robust policies for contact-rich and high precision manipulation tasks such as pipe assembly and kitting, in 1-2 hours of online interaction, achieving success rates of up to 100% and up to 3.75x improvement against the original BC policy. Code and video are available at https://pages.rai-inst.com/q2rl_website/","keywords":["cs.RO","cs.AI"],"about":[],"citation":[],"isPartOf":{"@type":"Dataset","name":"Forge Cascade Knowledge Graph","url":"https://forgecascade.org"},"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Forge Cascade","url":"https://forgecascade.org"}}