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Related papers: Competitive Policy Optimization

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This note introduces Isometric Policy Optimization (ISOPO), an efficient method to approximate the natural policy gradient in a single gradient step. In comparison, existing proximal policy methods such as GRPO or CISPO use multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Nilin Abrahamsen

Most reinforcement learning algorithms seek a single optimal strategy that solves a given task. However, it can often be valuable to learn a diverse set of solutions, for instance, to make an agent's interaction with users more engaging, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Wentse Chen , Shiyu Huang , Yuan Chiang , Tim Pearce , Wei-Wei Tu , Ting Chen , Jun Zhu

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most popular state-of-the-art on-policy algorithms that has become a standard baseline in modern reinforcement learning with applications in numerous fields. Though it delivers stable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Qisai Liu , Zhanhong Jiang , Hsin-Jung Yang , Mahsa Khosravi , Joshua R. Waite , Soumik Sarkar

We present Memory Augmented Policy Optimization (MAPO), a simple and novel way to leverage a memory buffer of promising trajectories to reduce the variance of policy gradient estimate. MAPO is applicable to deterministic environments with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-15 Chen Liang , Mohammad Norouzi , Jonathan Berant , Quoc Le , Ni Lao

Classical reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize the expected cumulative rewards. In this work, we consider the RL setting where the goal is to optimize the quantile of the cumulative rewards. We parameterize the policy controlling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Jinyang Jiang , Jiaqiao Hu , Yijie Peng

Score-function based methods for policy learning, such as REINFORCE and PPO, have delivered strong results in game-playing and robotics, yet their high variance often undermines training stability. Using pathwise policy gradients, i.e.…

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is a widely-used algorithm for on-policy reinforcement learning. This work offers an alternative perspective of PPO, in which it is decomposed into the inner-loop estimation of update vectors, and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Charlie B. Tan , Edan Toledo , Benjamin Ellis , Jakob N. Foerster , Ferenc Huszár

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

PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization) is a state-of-the-art policy gradient algorithm that has been successfully applied to complex computer games such as Dota 2 and Honor of Kings. In these environments, an agent makes compound actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-27 Xiulei Song , Yizhao Jin , Greg Slabaugh , Simon Lucas

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm is a deep reinforcement learning algorithm with outstanding performance, especially in continuous control tasks. But the performance of this method is still affected by its exploration ability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Junwei Zhang , Zhenghao Zhang , Shuai Han , Shuai Lü

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) approximates the trust region update using multiple epochs of clipped SGD. Each epoch may drift further from the natural gradient direction, creating path-dependent noise. To understand this drift, we can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Zelal Su , Mustafaoglu , Sungyoung Lee , Eshan Balachandar , Risto Miikkulainen , Keshav Pingali

We study policy optimization algorithms for computing correlated equilibria in multi-player general-sum Markov Games. Previous results achieve $O(T^{-1/2})$ convergence rate to a correlated equilibrium and an accelerated $O(T^{-3/4})$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Yang Cai , Haipeng Luo , Chen-Yu Wei , Weiqiang Zheng

Policy optimization (PO), an essential approach of reinforcement learning for a broad range of system classes, requires significantly more system data than indirect (identification-followed-by-control) methods or behavioral-based direct…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-18 Feiran Zhao , Florian Dörfler , Keyou You

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 gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Alekh Agarwal , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Gaurav Mahajan

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

Recent advancements in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), exemplified by DeepSeek-R1, have underscored the potential of scaling inference-time compute through Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). However, GRPO frequently suffers from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Yu Zhao , Fan Jiang , Tianle Liu , Bo Zeng , Yu Liu , Longyue Wang , Weihua Luo

Flow-based generative models, including diffusion models, excel at modeling continuous distributions in high-dimensional spaces. In this work, we introduce Flow Policy Optimization (FPO), a simple on-policy reinforcement learning algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-04 David McAllister , Songwei Ge , Brent Yi , Chung Min Kim , Ethan Weber , Hongsuk Choi , Haiwen Feng , Angjoo Kanazawa

Chemical process optimization and control are affected by 1) plant-model mismatch, 2) process disturbances, and 3) constraints for safe operation. Reinforcement learning by policy optimization would be a natural way to solve this due to its…

Learning in games provides a powerful framework to design control policies for self-interested agents that may be coupled through their dynamics, costs, or constraints. We consider the case where the dynamics of the coupled system can be…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-18 Mostafa M. Shibl , Vijay Gupta