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Preference optimization (PO) is indispensable for large language models (LLMs), with methods such as direct preference optimization (DPO) and proximal policy optimization (PPO) achieving great success. A common belief is that DPO is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Yue Wang , Qizhou Wang , Zizhuo Zhang , Gang Niu , Bo Han , Masashi Sugiyama

Reinforcement learning algorithms are fundamental to align large language models with human preferences and to enhance their reasoning capabilities. However, current reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from training instability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Yaru Hao , Li Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Zewen Chi , Furu Wei

Preference Optimization (PO), is gaining popularity as an alternative choice of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent research on aligning LLMs iteratively with synthetic or partially synthetic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Yaojie Shen , Xinyao Wang , Yulei Niu , Ying Zhou , Lexin Tang , Libo Zhang , Fan Chen , Longyin Wen

Policy optimization (PO) algorithms are used to refine Large Language Models for complex, multi-step reasoning. Current state-of-the-art pipelines enforce a strict think-then-answer format to elicit chain-of-thought (CoT); however, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Debdeep Sanyal , Aakash Sen Sharma , Dhruv Kumar , Saurabh Deshpande , Murari Mandal

Policy Optimization (PO) methods are among the most popular Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms in practice. Recently, Sherman et al. [2023a] proposed a PO-based algorithm with rate-optimal regret guarantees under the linear Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Asaf Cassel , Aviv Rosenberg

Deep reinforcement learning agents frequently suffer from premature convergence, where early entropy collapse causes the policy to discard exploratory behaviors before discovering globally optimal strategies. We introduce Optimistic Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Mai Pham , Vikrant Vaze , Peter Chin

We introduce a constrained optimization method for policy gradient reinforcement learning, which uses a virtual trust region to regulate each policy update. In addition to using the proximity of one single old policy as the normal trust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Hung Le , Thommen Karimpanal George , Majid Abdolshah , Dung Nguyen , Kien Do , Sunil Gupta , Svetha Venkatesh

We study reinforcement learning in hybrid discrete-continuous action spaces, such as settings where the discrete component selects a regime (or index) and the continuous component optimizes within it -- a structure common in robotics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Matias Alvo , Daniel Russo , Yash Kanoria

In the classical Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) framework, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is employed to learn from sparse, sentence-level rewards -- a challenging scenario in traditional deep reinforcement learning.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Han Zhong , Zikang Shan , Guhao Feng , Wei Xiong , Xinle Cheng , Li Zhao , Di He , Jiang Bian , Liwei Wang

Most of reinforcement learning algorithms optimize the discounted criterion which is beneficial to accelerate the convergence and reduce the variance of estimates. Although the discounted criterion is appropriate for certain tasks such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Xiaoteng Ma , Xiaohang Tang , Li Xia , Jun Yang , Qianchuan Zhao

Large Language Models (LLMs) can acquire extensive world knowledge through pre-training on large corpora. However, due to exposure to low-quality data, LLMs may exhibit harmful behavior without aligning with human values. The dominant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Tianhao Wu , Banghua Zhu , Ruoyu Zhang , Zhaojin Wen , Kannan Ramchandran , Jiantao Jiao

A multitude of industries depend on accurate and reasonable tabular data augmentation for their business processes. Contemporary methodologies in generating tabular data revolve around utilizing Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Shuo Yang , Chenchen Yuan , Yao Rong , Felix Steinbauer , Gjergji Kasneci

We study episodic reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary linear kernel Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this setting, both the reward function and the transition kernel are linear with respect to the given feature maps and are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Han Zhong , Zhongren Chen , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Csaba Szepesvári

Despite Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) dominating policy gradient methods -- from robotic control to game AI -- its static trust region forces a brittle trade-off: aggressive clipping stifles early exploration, while late-stage updates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Ben Rahman

Hierarchical reinforcement learning is a promising approach to tackle long-horizon decision-making problems with sparse rewards. Unfortunately, most methods still decouple the lower-level skill acquisition process and the training of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-15 Alexander C. Li , Carlos Florensa , Ignasi Clavera , Pieter Abbeel

While policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) achieves tremendous successes in practice, it is significantly less understood in theory, especially compared with value-based RL. In particular, it remains elusive how to design a provably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Qi Cai , Zhuoran Yang , Chi Jin , Zhaoran Wang

Policy optimization (PO) is a key ingredient for reinforcement learning (RL). For control design, certain constraints are usually enforced on the policies to optimize, accounting for either the stability, robustness, or safety concerns on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-16 Kaiqing Zhang , Bin Hu , Tamer Başar

In this work we are interested in the construction of numerical methods for high dimensional constrained nonlinear optimization problems by particle-based gradient-free techniques. A consensus-based optimization (CBO) approach combined with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-23 Giacomo Borghi , Michael Herty , Lorenzo Pareschi

Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm employing a clipped surrogate objective (PPO-Clip) is a prominent exemplar of the policy optimization methods. However, despite its remarkable empirical success, PPO-Clip lacks theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Nai-Chieh Huang , Ping-Chun Hsieh , Kuo-Hao Ho , I-Chen Wu

A fundamental challenge in model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) lies in the trade-off between generalization and robustness against exploitation errors in out-of-distribution (OOD) regions. While OOD samples may capture valid…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Hongqiang Lin , Dongxu Zhang , Yiding Sun , Mingzhe Li , Ning Yang , Haijun Zhang