English
Related papers

Related papers: Fingerprint Policy Optimisation for Robust Reinfor…

200 papers

Traditional policy gradient methods are fundamentally flawed. Natural gradients converge quicker and better, forming the foundation of contemporary Reinforcement Learning such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-07 W. J. A. van Heeswijk

Policy optimization methods are powerful algorithms in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for their flexibility to deal with policy parameterization and ability to handle model misspecification. However, these methods usually suffer from slow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-19 Yunfan Li , Yiran Wang , Yu Cheng , Lin Yang

Many reinforcement learning algorithms use value functions to guide the search for better policies. These methods estimate the value of a single policy while generalizing across many states. The core idea of this paper is to flip this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Jean Harb , Tom Schaul , Doina Precup , Pierre-Luc Bacon

We consider the problem of learning control policies that optimize a reward function while satisfying constraints due to considerations of safety, fairness, or other costs. We propose a new algorithm, Projection-Based Constrained Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

By leveraging differentiable dynamics, Reparameterization Policy Gradient (RPG) achieves high sample efficiency. However, current approaches are hindered by two critical limitations: the under-utilization of computationally expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Hai Zhong , Xun Wang , Zhuoran Li , Longbo Huang

Instability and slowness are two main problems in deep reinforcement learning. Even if proximal policy optimization (PPO) is the state of the art, it still suffers from these two problems. We introduce an improved algorithm based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-01 Zhenyu Zhang , Xiangfeng Luo , Tong Liu , Shaorong Xie , Jianshu Wang , Wei Wang , Yang Li , Yan Peng

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are widely used for their strong asymptotic performance and training stability, but they struggle to scale with larger batch sizes, as additional parallel environments yield redundant data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Jianren Wang , Yifan Su , Abhinav Gupta , Deepak Pathak

We propose Frictive Policy Optimization (FPO), a framework for learning language model policies that regulate not only what to say, but when and how to intervene in order to manage epistemic and normative risk. Unlike standard alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 James Pustejovsky , Nikhil Krishnaswamy

Much of the recent success of deep reinforcement learning has been driven by regularized policy optimization (RPO) algorithms with strong performance across multiple domains. In this family of methods, agents are trained to maximize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-24 Ted Moskovitz , Michael Arbel , Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano

Informed and robust decision making in the face of uncertainty is critical for robots that perform physical tasks alongside people. We formulate this as Bayesian Reinforcement Learning over latent Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-02-11 Gilwoo Lee , Brian Hou , Sanjiban Choudhury , Siddhartha S. Srinivasa

Importance sampling (IS) represents a fundamental technique for a large surge of off-policy reinforcement learning approaches. Policy gradient (PG) methods, in particular, significantly benefit from IS, enabling the effective reuse of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Matteo Papini , Giorgio Manganini , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Training reinforcement learning (RL) policies for legged robots remains challenging due to high-dimensional continuous actions, hardware constraints, and limited exploration. Existing methods for locomotion and whole-body control work well…

Experiments in engineering are typically conducted in controlled environments where parameters can be set to any desired value. This assumes that the same applies in a real-world setting -- an assumption that is often incorrect as many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Mike Diessner , Kevin J. Wilson , Richard D. Whalley

Safe reinforcement learning (safe RL) aims to respect safety requirements while optimizing long-term performance. In many practical applications, however, the problem involves an infinite number of constraints, known as semi-infinite safe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Jiaming Zhang , Yujie Yang , Haoning Wang , Liping Zhang , Shengbo Eben Li

Searching the space of policies directly for the optimal policy has been one popular method for solving partially observable reinforcement learning problems. Typically, with each change of the target policy, its value is estimated from the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Leonid Peshkin , Christian R. Shelton

In the automation of many kinds of processes, the observable outcome can often be described as the combined effect of an entire sequence of actions, or controls, applied throughout its execution. In these cases, strategies to optimise…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-04-05 Rafael Oliveira , Fernando H. M. Rocha , Lionel Ott , Vitor Guizilini , Fabio Ramos , Valdir Grassi

Large language models are commonly trained through multi-stage post-training: first via RLHF, then fine-tuned for other downstream objectives. Yet even small downstream updates can compromise earlier learned behaviors (e.g., safety),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Mahdi Sabbaghi , George Pappas , Adel Javanmard , Hamed Hassani

A key challenge in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) lies in the intractability of their likelihood functions, which are essential for the RL objective, necessitating corresponding approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Nianyi Lin , Jiajie Zhang , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

Genetic algorithms have been widely used in many practical optimization problems. Inspired by natural selection, operators, including mutation, crossover and selection, provide effective heuristics for search and black-box optimization.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-14 Tanmay Gangwani , Jian Peng

We introduce Wasserstein Policy Optimization (WPO), an actor-critic algorithm for reinforcement learning in continuous action spaces. WPO can be derived as an approximation to Wasserstein gradient flow over the space of all policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-02 David Pfau , Ian Davies , Diana Borsa , Joao G. M. Araujo , Brendan Tracey , Hado van Hasselt