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Related papers: Taylor Expansion Policy Optimization

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This paper introduces two simple techniques to improve off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. First, we formulate off-policy RL as a stochastic proximal point iteration. The target network plays the role of the variable of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Marco Maggipinto , Gian Antonio Susto , Pratik Chaudhari

Many reinforcement learning approaches rely on temporal-difference (TD) learning to learn a critic. However, TD-learning updates can be high variance. Here, we introduce a model-based RL framework, Taylor TD, which reduces this variance in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Michele Garibbo , Maxime Robeyns , Laurence Aitchison

We develop theory and algorithms for average-reward on-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL). We first consider bounding the difference of the long-term average reward for two policies. We show that previous work based on the discounted return…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Yiming Zhang , Keith W. Ross

We introduce a new algorithm for reinforcement learning called Maximum aposteriori Policy Optimisation (MPO) based on coordinate ascent on a relative entropy objective. We show that several existing methods can directly be related to our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-25 Abbas Abdolmaleki , Jost Tobias Springenberg , Yuval Tassa , Remi Munos , Nicolas Heess , Martin Riedmiller

Recent years have witnessed a tremendous improvement of deep reinforcement learning. However, a challenging problem is that an agent may suffer from inefficient exploration, particularly for on-policy methods. Previous exploration methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Ling Pan , Qingpeng Cai , Longbo Huang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a challenging setting where existing off-policy actor-critic methods perform poorly due to the overestimation of out-of-distribution state-action pairs. Thus, various additional augmentations are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Zifeng Zhuang , Kun Lei , Jinxin Liu , Donglin Wang , Yilang Guo

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

Policy optimization methods with function approximation are widely used in multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, it remains elusive how to design such algorithms with statistical guarantees. Leveraging a multi-agent performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Yulai Zhao , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Jason D. Lee

Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) augments large language models (LLMs) with the ability to invoke external tools during long-form reasoning, such as search engines and code interpreters, to solve tasks beyond the capabilities of internal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Hongru Wang , Cheng Qian , Wanjun Zhong , Xiusi Chen , Jiahao Qiu , Shijue Huang , Bowen Jin , Mengdi Wang , Kam-Fai Wong , Heng Ji

In this paper, we study reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to solve real-world decision problems with the objective of maximizing the long-term reward as well as satisfying cumulative constraints. We propose a novel first-order policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Yongshuai Liu , Jiaxin Ding , Xin Liu

Adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) for agent tasks is critical in developing language agents. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a promising technique for this adaptation with the alleviation of compounding errors, offering a means…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Wentao Shi , Mengqi Yuan , Junkang Wu , Qifan Wang , Fuli Feng

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Penghui Qi , Xiangxin Zhou , Zichen Liu , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Min Lin , Wee Sun Lee

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

Policy networks are a central feature of deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for continuous control, enabling the estimation and sampling of high-value actions. From the variational inference perspective on RL, policy networks, when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Joseph Marino , Alexandre Piché , Alessandro Davide Ialongo , Yisong Yue

We develop a new class of model-free deep reinforcement learning algorithms for data-driven, learning-based control. Our Generalized Policy Improvement algorithms combine the policy improvement guarantees of on-policy methods with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 James Queeney , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Christos G. Cassandras

A significant portion of recent research on Large Language Model (LLM) alignment focuses on developing new policy optimization methods based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Two prominent directions have emerged: (i) a shift…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Svetlana Glazyrina , Maksim Kryzhanovskiy , Roman Ischenko

We propose a new family of policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning, which alternate between sampling data through interaction with the environment, and optimizing a "surrogate" objective function using stochastic gradient ascent.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-29 John Schulman , Filip Wolski , Prafulla Dhariwal , Alec Radford , Oleg Klimov

Recent advances in Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated their promising general capabilities. However, their performance in specialized real-world domains often degrades due to challenges in effectively integrating external…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yuzheng Cai , Siqi Cai , Yuchen Shi , Zihan Xu , Lichao Chen , Yulei Qin , Xiaoyu Tan , Gang Li , Zongyi Li , Haojia Lin , Yong Mao , Ke Li , Xing Sun

Reinforcement learning techniques leveraging deep learning have made tremendous progress in recent years. However, the complexity of neural networks prevents practitioners from understanding their behavior. Decision trees have gained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Daniël Vos , Sicco Verwer

We propose a new algorithm for fine-tuning large language models using reinforcement learning. Tapered Off-Policy REINFORCE (TOPR) uses an asymmetric, tapered variant of importance sampling to speed up learning while maintaining stable…