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Policy optimization is a fundamental principle for designing reinforcement learning algorithms, and one example is the proximal policy optimization algorithm with a clipped surrogate objective (PPO-Clip), which has been popularly used in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-02 Nai-Chieh Huang , Ping-Chun Hsieh , Kuo-Hao Ho , Hsuan-Yu Yao , Kai-Chun Hu , Liang-Chun Ouyang , I-Chen Wu

We study reinforcement learning (RL) in the setting of continuous time and space, for an infinite horizon with a discounted objective and the underlying dynamics driven by a stochastic differential equation. Built upon recent advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Hanyang Zhao , Wenpin Tang , David D. Yao

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is among the most widely used algorithms in reinforcement learning, which achieves state-of-the-art performance in many challenging problems. The keys to its success are the reliable policy updates through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-02 Mónika Farsang , Luca Szegletes

Reinforcement learning (RL) in large environments often suffers from severe computational bottlenecks, as conventional regret minimization algorithms require repeated, costly calls to planning and statistical estimation oracles. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Haichen Hu , Jian Qian , David Simchi-Levi

The problem of Offline Policy Evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a critical step towards applying RL in real-life applications. Existing work on OPE mostly focus on evaluating a fixed target policy $\pi$, which does not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Ming Yin , Yu Bai , Yu-Xiang Wang

Policy optimization methods are one of the most widely used classes of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. However, theoretical understanding of these methods remains insufficient. Even in the episodic (time-inhomogeneous) tabular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Tianhao Wu , Yunchang Yang , Han Zhong , Liwei Wang , Simon S. Du , Jiantao Jiao

While quantum reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted a surge of attention recently, its theoretical understanding is limited. In particular, it remains elusive how to design provably efficient quantum RL algorithms that can address the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-06-14 Han Zhong , Jiachen Hu , Yecheng Xue , Tongyang Li , Liwei Wang

The problem of constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) holds significant importance as it provides a framework for addressing critical safety satisfaction concerns in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). However, with the introduction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Chengbin Xuan , Feng Zhang , Faliang Yin , Hak-Keung Lam

Proximal Policy Optimization with Adaptive Exploration (axPPO) is introduced as a novel learning algorithm. This paper investigates the exploration-exploitation tradeoff within the context of reinforcement learning and aims to contribute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Andrei Lixandru

Reinforcement Learning (RL) in partially observable environments poses significant challenges due to the complexity of learning under uncertainty. While additional information, such as that available in simulations, can enhance training,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yueheng Li , Guangming Xie , Zongqing Lu

Value function approximation is important in modern reinforcement learning (RL) problems especially when the state space is (infinitely) large. Despite the importance and wide applicability of value function approximation, its theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-24 Hanlin Zhu , Ruosong Wang , Jason D. Lee

Policy-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) has established itself as the dominant paradigm in generative recommendation for optimizing sequential user interactions. However, when applied to offline historical logs, these methods suffer a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Jie Jiang , Yusen Huo , Xiangxin Zhan , Changping Wang , Jun Zhang

We describe an iterative procedure for optimizing policies, with guaranteed monotonic improvement. By making several approximations to the theoretically-justified procedure, we develop a practical algorithm, called Trust Region Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-24 John Schulman , Sergey Levine , Philipp Moritz , Michael I. Jordan , Pieter Abbeel

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a highly popular policy-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach. However, we observe that the homogeneous exploration process in PPO could cause an unexpected stability issue in the training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-14 Qisheng Zhang , Zhen Guo , Audun Jøsang , Lance M. Kaplan , Feng Chen , Dong H. Jeong , Jin-Hee Cho

We introduce \texttt{OPO-CMDP}, the first policy optimization algorithm for stochastic Contextual Markov Decision Process (CMDPs) under general offline function approximation. Our approach achieves a high probability regret bound of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Orin Levy , Aviv Rosenberg , Alon Cohen , Yishay Mansour

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

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), also known as batch RL, aims to optimize policy from a large pre-recorded dataset without interaction with the environment. This setting offers the promise of utilizing diverse, pre-collected datasets to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Qiang He , Xinwen Hou

We study lifelong reinforcement learning (RL) in a regret minimization setting of linear contextual Markov decision process (MDP), where the agent needs to learn a multi-task policy while solving a streaming sequence of tasks. We propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Sanae Amani , Lin F. Yang , Ching-An Cheng

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) enhances Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning but suffers from advantage collapse on ``hard samples'' where all rollouts fail. This lack of variance eliminates crucial learning signals.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Xinyu Lu , Kaiqi Zhang , Jinglin Yang , Boxi Cao , Yaojie Lu , Hongyu Lin , Min He , Xianpei Han , Le Sun

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a ubiquitous on-policy reinforcement learning algorithm but is significantly less utilized than off-policy learning algorithms in multi-agent settings. This is often due to the belief that PPO is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-07 Chao Yu , Akash Velu , Eugene Vinitsky , Jiaxuan Gao , Yu Wang , Alexandre Bayen , Yi Wu