Related papers: On Proximal Policy Optimization's Heavy-tailed Gra…
Preference optimization has become a central paradigm for aligning large language models with human feedback. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) simplifies reinforcement learning from human feedback by directly optimizing pairwise…
We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…
This paper considers the problem of learning safe policies in the context of reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, we consider the notion of probabilistic safety. This is, we aim to design policies that maintain the state of the…
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…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is pivotal for enabling large language models (LLMs) to generate long chains of thought (CoT) for complex tasks like math and reasoning. However, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), effective in many RL…
This paper studies the distributed optimization problem under the influence of heavy-tailed gradient noises. Here, a heavy-tailed noise means that the noise does not necessarily satisfy the bounded variance assumption. Instead, it satisfies…
Existing policy-gradient methods for auto-regressive language models typically select subsequent tokens one at a time as actions in the policy. While effective for many generation tasks, such an approach may not fully capture the structure…
Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DPSGD) is widely utilized to preserve training data privacy in deep learning, which first clips the gradients to a predefined norm and then injects calibrated noise into the training…
Despite Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) dominating policy gradient methods -- from robotic control to game AI -- its static trust region forces a brittle trade-off: aggressive clipping stifles early exploration, while late-stage updates…
We consider the problem of learning control policies that optimize a reward function while satisfying constraints due to considerations of safety, fairness, or other costs. We propose a new algorithm, Projection-Based Constrained Policy…
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a promising critic-free reinforcement learning paradigm for reasoning tasks. However, standard GRPO employs a coarse-grained credit assignment mechanism that propagates group-level…
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has significantly enhanced the reasoning capability of large language models by optimizing the arithmetic mean of token-level rewards. Unfortunately, GRPO is observed to suffer from unstable policy…
The role of reinforcement learning (RL) in enhancing the reasoning of large language models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly significant. Despite the success of RL in many scenarios, there are still many challenges in improving the reasoning…
Policy gradient methods have enabled deep reinforcement learning (RL) to approach challenging continuous control problems, even when the underlying systems involve highly nonlinear dynamics that generate complex non-smooth optimization…
Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms are among the best candidates for the much-anticipated applications of reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, such as robotics. However, the trial-and-error nature of these methods poses safety…
The policy represented by the deep neural network can overfit the spurious features in observations, which hamper a reinforcement learning agent from learning effective policy. This issue becomes severe in high-dimensional state, where the…
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has been proposed as a promising alternative to Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) based Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). However, empirical evaluations consistently reveal suboptimal…
Latent reasoning offers a more efficient alternative to explicit reasoning by compressing intermediate reasoning into continuous representations and substantially shortening reasoning chains. However, existing latent reasoning methods…
We propose policy gradient algorithms which learn risk-sensitive policies in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Our proposed algorithms maximize the distortion risk measure (DRM) of the cumulative reward in an episodic Markov decision…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) plays a pivotal role in improving the reasoning ability of large language models. However, widely used PPO surrogate objectives are fundamentally local, as they rely on a local…