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For many applications of reinforcement learning it can be more convenient to specify both a reward function and constraints, rather than trying to design behavior through the reward function. For example, systems that physically interact…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-31 Joshua Achiam , David Held , Aviv Tamar , Pieter Abbeel

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is among the most widely used deep reinforcement learning algorithms, yet its theoretical foundations remain incomplete. Most importantly, convergence and understanding of fundamental PPO advantages remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Leif Doering , Daniel Schmidt , Moritz Melcher , Sebastian Kassing , Benedikt Wille , Tilman Aach , Simon Weissmann

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

Very recently proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithms have been proposed as first-order optimization methods for effective reinforcement learning. While PPO is inspired by the same learning theory that justifies trust region policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-20 Gang Chen , Yiming Peng , Mengjie Zhang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents can solve diverse tasks but often exhibit unsafe behavior. Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) address this by enforcing safety constraints, yet existing methods either sacrifice reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-18 Nikola Milosevic , Johannes Müller , Nico Scherf

Reinforcement Learning(RL) with sparse rewards is a major challenge. We propose \emph{Hindsight Trust Region Policy Optimization}(HTRPO), a new RL algorithm that extends the highly successful TRPO algorithm with \emph{hindsight} to tackle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Hanbo Zhang , Site Bai , Xuguang Lan , David Hsu , Nanning Zheng

Reinforcement Learning, a machine learning framework for training an autonomous agent based on rewards, has shown outstanding results in various domains. However, it is known that learning a good policy is difficult in a domain where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-27 Takahisa Imagawa , Takuya Hiraoka , Yoshimasa Tsuruoka

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms can perform poorly in real-world tasks due to the discrepancy between source and target environments. This discrepancy is commonly viewed as the disturbance in transition dynamics. Many existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Yufei Kuang , Miao Lu , Jie Wang , Qi Zhou , Bin Li , Houqiang Li

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

Safe reinforcement learning aims to learn the optimal policy while satisfying safety constraints, which is essential in real-world applications. However, current algorithms still struggle for efficient policy updates with hard constraint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Linrui Zhang , Li Shen , Long Yang , Shixiang Chen , Bo Yuan , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

We propose a new sample-efficient methodology, called Supervised Policy Update (SPU), for deep reinforcement learning. Starting with data generated by the current policy, SPU formulates and solves a constrained optimization problem in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Quan Vuong , Yiming Zhang , Keith W. Ross

In recent years, trust region on-policy reinforcement learning has achieved impressive results in addressing complex control tasks and gaming scenarios. However, contemporary state-of-the-art algorithms within this category primarily…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Weiye Zhao , Feihan Li , Yifan Sun , Rui Chen , Tianhao Wei , Changliu Liu

Aligning large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific data remains a fundamental challenge. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) offers a straightforward way to inject domain knowledge but often degrades the model's generality. In contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Linxuan Xia , Xiaolong Yang , Yongyuan Chen , Enyue Zhao , Deng Cai , Yasheng Wang , Boxi Wu

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

Policy Optimization (PO) algorithms have been proven particularly suited to handle the high-dimensionality of real-world continuous control tasks. In this context, Trust Region Policy Optimization methods represent a popular approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Antonio Terpin , Nicolas Lanzetti , Batuhan Yardim , Florian Dörfler , Giorgia Ramponi

Many reinforcement learning algorithms can be seen as versions of approximate policy iteration (API). While standard API often performs poorly, it has been shown that learning can be stabilized by regularizing each policy update by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Nevena Lazić , Botao Hao , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Dale Schuurmans , Csaba Szepesvári

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) dominates reinforcement learning and LLM alignment but relies on a "hard clipping" mechanism that discards valuable gradients. Conversely, unconstrained methods like SPO expose the optimization to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Yiheng Zhang , Yiming Wang , Kaiyan Zhao , Zhenglin Wan , Jiayu Chen , Leong Hou U

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has shown promise in discrete action spaces by eliminating value function dependencies through group-based advantage estimation. However, its application to continuous control remains unexplored,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Rajat Khanda , Mohammad Baqar , Sambuddha Chakrabarti , Satyasaran Changdar

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

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