Related papers: Optimization Issues in KL-Constrained Approximate …
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is one of the promising approaches for introducing robots into complicated environments. The recent remarkable progress of DRL stands on regularization of policy, which allows the policy to improve stably…
In recent years, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been applied to real-world problems with increasing success. Such applications often require to put constraints on the agent's behavior. Existing algorithms for constrained RL (CRL) rely on…
The rapidly increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) raise an urgent need to align AI systems with diverse human preferences to simultaneously enhance their usefulness and safety, despite the often conflicting nature of these…
Policy mirror descent (PMD) provides a principled framework for reinforcement learning (RL) by iteratively solving KL-regularized policy improvement subproblems. While this approach has been adopted in training advanced LLMs such as Kimi…
Distributed training and increasing the gradient update frequency are practical strategies to accelerate learning and improve performance, but both exacerbate a central challenge: \textit{policy lag}, which is the mismatch between the…
We study a Federated Reinforcement Learning (FedRL) problem with constraint heterogeneity. In our setting, we aim to solve a reinforcement learning problem with multiple constraints while $N$ training agents are located in $N$ different…
We present Coordinated Proximal Policy Optimization (CoPPO), an algorithm that extends the original Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to the multi-agent setting. The key idea lies in the coordinated adaptation of step size during the…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has re-emerged as a natural approach for training interactive LLM agents in real-world environments. However, directly applying the widely used Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm to multi-turn…
Although well-established in general reinforcement learning (RL), value-based methods are rarely explored in constrained RL (CRL) for their incapability of finding policies that can randomize among multiple actions. To apply value-based…
Policy gradient methods are known to be highly sensitive to the choice of policy parameterization. In particular, the widely used softmax parameterization can induce ill-conditioned optimization landscapes and lead to exponentially slow…
Despite impressive results, reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from slow convergence and requires a large variety of tuning strategies. In this paper, we investigate the ability of RL algorithms on simple continuous control tasks. We show…
We revisit a classic "chicken-and-egg" problem in reinforcement learning: to safely improve a policy, the value function must be accurate on the state-visitation distribution of the updated policy. That distribution over states is unknown…
We study a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problem where the agents interact over a given network. The goal of the agents is to cooperatively maximize the average of their entropy-regularized long-term rewards. To overcome the…
Policy gradient algorithms have been successfully applied to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). KL regularization is ubiquitous, yet the design surface, choice of KL direction (forward vs. reverse),…
Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found tremendous success in simulated domains, they often cannot directly be applied to physical systems, especially in cases where there are hard constraints to satisfy (e.g. on safety…
In numerous reinforcement learning (RL) problems involving safety-critical systems, a key challenge lies in balancing multiple objectives while simultaneously meeting all stringent safety constraints. To tackle this issue, we propose a…
Sequence prediction models can be learned from example sequences with a variety of training algorithms. Maximum likelihood learning is simple and efficient, yet can suffer from compounding error at test time. Reinforcement learning such as…
While the idea of robust dynamic programming (DP) is compelling for systems affected by uncertainty, addressing worst-case disturbances generally results in excessive conservatism. This paper introduces a method for constructing control…
We propose a policy improvement algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) which is called Rerouted Behavior Improvement (RBI). RBI is designed to take into account the evaluation errors of the Q-function. Such errors are common in RL when…
We study the roots of algorithmic progress in deep policy gradient algorithms through a case study on two popular algorithms: Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO). Specifically, we investigate the…