Related papers: On Proximal Policy Optimization's Heavy-tailed Gra…
In existing distributed stochastic optimization studies, it is usually assumed that the gradient noise has a bounded variance. However, recent research shows that the heavy-tailed noise, which allows an unbounded variance, is closer to…
Policy gradient methods ignore the potential value of adjusting environment variables: unobservable state features that are randomly determined by the environment in a physical setting, but are controllable in a simulator. This can lead to…
In this paper we analyze the qualitative differences between evolutionary strategies and reinforcement learning algorithms by focusing on two popular state-of-the-art algorithms: the OpenAI-ES evolutionary strategy and the Proximal Policy…
Reinforcement learning (RL) plays an increasingly important role in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet stable and performant policy optimization remains challenging. Token-level importance ratios often…
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…
Policy optimization (PO) algorithms are used to refine Large Language Models for complex, multi-step reasoning. Current state-of-the-art pipelines enforce a strict think-then-answer format to elicit chain-of-thought (CoT); however, the…
Post-training plays a crucial role in refining and aligning large language models to meet specific tasks and human preferences. While recent advancements in post-training techniques, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO),…
Controlling a non-statically bipedal robot is challenging due to the complex dynamics and multi-criterion optimization involved. Recent works have demonstrated the effectiveness of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for simulation and…
Group-based reinforcement learning (RL), such as GRPO, has advanced the capabilities of large language models on long-horizon agentic tasks. To enable more fine-grained policy updates, recent research has increasingly shifted toward…
Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as the standard for training reasoning capabilities in large language models through reinforcement learning. By estimating advantages using group-mean rewards rather than a learned…
Process reward models (PRMs) allow for fine-grained credit assignment in reinforcement learning (RL), and seemingly contrast with outcome reward models (ORMs), which assign a single reward to an entire trajectory. However, we provide…
Gradient compression has surfaced as a key technique to address the challenge of communication efficiency in distributed learning. In distributed deep learning, however, it is observed that gradient distributions are heavy-tailed, with…
Existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods for large language models have advanced rapidly, yet their design has largely been guided by heuristics rather than systematic theoretical principles. This gap limits our…
Aligning large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) for complex reasoning via reinforcement learning is often hampered by the limitations of existing policy optimization algorithms, such as static training schedules and the rigid, uniform…
This paper introduces a novel agent-based approach for enhancing existing portfolio strategies using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). Rather than focusing solely on traditional portfolio construction, our approach aims to improve an…
Reinforcement learning substantially improves pretrained language models, but it remains understudied why critic-free methods such as PPO and GRPO work as well as they do, and when they should provide the largest gains. We develop a…
Reaching tasks with random targets and obstacles is a challenging task for robotic manipulators. In this study, we propose a novel model-free reinforcement learning approach based on proximal policy optimization (PPO) for training a deep…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been successfully applied in several research domains such as robot navigation and automated video game playing. However, these methods require excessive computation and interaction with the…
Recently, test-time scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional reasoning capabilities across scientific and professional tasks by generating long chains-of-thought (CoT). As a crucial component for developing these…
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…