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Training large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) methods such as PPO and GRPO commonly relies on ratio clipping to stabilise updates. While effective at preventing instability, clipping discards information, introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Madeleine Dwyer , Adam Sobey , Adriane Chapman

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

We study the distributed stochastic optimization (DSO) problem under a heavy-tailed noise condition by utilizing a multi-agent system. Despite the extensive research on DSO algorithms used to solve DSO problems under light-tailed noise…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-23 Zhan Yu , Lan Liao , Deming Yuan , Daniel W. C. Ho , Ding-Xuan Zhou

This study investigates cooperation evolution mechanisms in the spatial public goods game. A novel deep reinforcement learning framework, Proximal Policy Optimization with Adversarial Curriculum Transfer (PPO-ACT), is proposed to model…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Zhaoqilin Yang , Chanchan Li , Xin Wang , Youliang Tian

Importance sampling (IS) represents a fundamental technique for a large surge of off-policy reinforcement learning approaches. Policy gradient (PG) methods, in particular, significantly benefit from IS, enabling the effective reuse of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Matteo Papini , Giorgio Manganini , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), due to the deterministic verification, becomes a dominant paradigm for enhancing the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). The community witnesses the rapid change from the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Mingwei Xu , Hao Fang

Heavy-tailed noise is pervasive in modern machine learning applications, arising from data heterogeneity, outliers, and non-stationary stochastic environments. While second-order methods can significantly accelerate convergence in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-14 Abdurakhmon Sadiev , Peter Richtárik , Ilyas Fatkhullin

In importance sampling (IS)-based reinforcement learning algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), IS weights are typically clipped to avoid large variance in learning. However, policy update from clipped statistics induces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-30 Seungyul Han , Youngchul Sung

Recent successful deep reinforcement learning algorithms, such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) or Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), are fundamentally variations of conservative policy iteration (CPI). These algorithms iterate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-27 Erinc Merdivan , Sten Hanke , Matthieu Geist

Reinforcement Learning, particularly through policy gradient methods, has played a central role in enabling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, the optimization stability of policy gradients in this setting remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Luckeciano C. Melo , Alessandro Abate , Yarin Gal

In this paper, we implement three state-of-art continuous reinforcement learning algorithms, Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Policy Gradient (PG)in portfolio management. All of them are…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2018-11-20 Zhipeng Liang , Hao Chen , Junhao Zhu , Kangkang Jiang , Yanran Li

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms often require a large amount of data and struggle in sparse-reward domains with long planning horizons and multiple sub-goals. In this paper, we propose a neuro-symbolic extension of Proximal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Simone Murari , Celeste Veronese , Daniele Meli

Large Language Models (LLMs) can acquire extensive world knowledge through pre-training on large corpora. However, due to exposure to low-quality data, LLMs may exhibit harmful behavior without aligning with human values. The dominant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Tianhao Wu , Banghua Zhu , Ruoyu Zhang , Zhaojin Wen , Kannan Ramchandran , Jiantao Jiao

The Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) plays a pivotal role in shaping the impact of large language models (LLMs), contributing significantly to controlling output toxicity and selecting output styles, particularly as LLMs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-11 Miao Fan , Chen Hu , Shuchang Zhou

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

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-15 Jinyang Jiang , Jiaqiao Hu , Yijie Peng

Policy gradient algorithms have driven many recent advancements in language model reasoning. An appealing property is their ability to learn from exploration on their own trajectories, a process crucial for fostering diverse and creative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Aleksei Petrenko , Ben Lipkin , Kevin Chen , Erik Wijmans , Marco Cusumano-Towner , Raja Giryes , Philipp Krähenbühl

Instability and slowness are two main problems in deep reinforcement learning. Even if proximal policy optimization (PPO) is the state of the art, it still suffers from these two problems. We introduce an improved algorithm based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-01 Zhenyu Zhang , Xiangfeng Luo , Tong Liu , Shaorong Xie , Jianshu Wang , Wei Wang , Yang Li , Yan Peng

Optimizing communication topology is fundamental to the efficiency and effectiveness of Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). While recent approaches utilize reinforcement learning to dynamically construct…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Yueyang Cang , Xiaoteng Zhang , Erlu Zhao , Zehua Ji , Yuhang Liu , Yuchen He , Zhiyuan Ning , Chen Yijun , Wenge Que , Li Shi

We consider the task of heavy-tailed statistical estimation given streaming $p$-dimensional samples. This could also be viewed as stochastic optimization under heavy-tailed distributions, with an additional $O(p)$ space complexity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-28 Che-Ping Tsai , Adarsh Prasad , Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Pradeep Ravikumar

Proximal Policy Optimization with Adaptive Exploration (axPPO) is introduced as a novel learning algorithm. This paper investigates the exploration-exploitation tradeoff within the context of reinforcement learning and aims to contribute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Andrei Lixandru