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Related papers: Near Optimal Policy Optimization via REPS

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A popular perspective in Reinforcement learning (RL) casts the problem as probabilistic inference on a graphical model of the Markov decision process (MDP). The core object of study is the probability of each state-action pair being visited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Jean Tarbouriech , Tor Lattimore , Brendan O'Donoghue

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

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with an unknown cost function and employ stochastic convex optimization tools to address the problem of imitation learning, which consists of learning a policy from a finite set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Angeliki Kamoutsi , Goran Banjac , John Lygeros

Uncertainty estimation for Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a critical component in control tasks where agents must balance safe exploration and efficient learning. While deep neural networks have enabled breakthroughs in RL, they often lack…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Matthijs van der Lende , Juan Cardenas-Cartagena

In probably approximately correct (PAC) reinforcement learning (RL), an agent is required to identify an $\epsilon$-optimal policy with probability $1-\delta$. While minimax optimal algorithms exist for this problem, its instance-dependent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Andrea Tirinzoni , Aymen Al-Marjani , Emilie Kaufmann

Policy gradient reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved impressive performance in challenging learning tasks such as continuous control, but suffer from high sample complexity. Experience replay is a commonly used approach to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-19 Saad Mohamad , Giovanni Montana

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) which seeks to learn a good policy based on a fixed, pre-collected dataset. A fundamental challenge behind this task is the distributional shift due to the dataset lacking sufficient exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Wenzhuo Zhou

The recent remarkable progress of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) stands on regularization of policy for stable and efficient learning. A popular method, named proximal policy optimization (PPO), has been introduced for this purpose. PPO…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Taisuke Kobayashi

The goal of policy gradient approaches is to find a policy in a given class of policies which maximizes the expected return. Given a differentiable model of the policy, we want to apply a gradient-ascent technique to reach a local optimum.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Mattis Manfred Kämmerer

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central component of post-training for large language models (LLMs), particularly for complex reasoning tasks that require stable optimization over long generation horizons. However, achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yuepeng Sheng , Yuwei Huang , Shuman Liu , Anxiang Zeng , Haibo Zhang

Stochastic optimization algorithms, particularly stochastic policy gradient (SPG), report significant success in reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, up to now, that how to speedily acquire an optimal solution for RL is still a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-22 Haobin Zhang , Zhuang Yang

Safe reinforcement learning aims to learn the optimal policy while satisfying safety constraints, which is essential in real-world applications. However, current algorithms still struggle for efficient policy updates with hard constraint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Linrui Zhang , Li Shen , Long Yang , Shixiang Chen , Bo Yuan , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

On-policy reinforcement learning methods, like Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), often demand extensive data per update, leading to sample inefficiency. This paper introduces Reflective Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Yaozhong Gan , Renye Yan , Zhe Wu , Junliang Xing

In this paper, a new population-guided parallel learning scheme is proposed to enhance the performance of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). In the proposed scheme, multiple identical learners with their own value-functions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Whiyoung Jung , Giseung Park , Youngchul Sung

Black-box policy optimization is a class of reinforcement learning algorithms that explores and updates the policies at the parameter level. This class of algorithms is widely applied in robotics with movement primitives or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Marius Memmel , Puze Liu , Davide Tateo , Jan Peters

The policy gradient theorem is defined based on an objective with respect to the initial distribution over states. In the discounted case, this results in policies that are optimal for one distribution over initial states, but may not be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-12 Riashat Islam , Raihan Seraj , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Doina Precup

Recently, GRPO-based reinforcement learning has shown remarkable progress in optimizing flow-matching models, effectively improving their alignment with task-specific rewards. Within these frameworks, the policy update relies on…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Jing Wang , Jiajun Liang , Jie Liu , Henglin Liu , Gongye Liu , Jun Zheng , Wanyuan Pang , Ao Ma , Zhenyu Xie , Xintao Wang , Meng Wang , Pengfei Wan , Xiaodan Liang

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), as the widely employed policy based reinforcement learning (RL) methods, are prone to converge to a sub-optimal solution as they limit the policy representation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Jun Song , Chaoyue Zhao

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) methods can successfully solve a wide range of sequential decision problems. However, learning policies that can generalize predictably across multiple tasks in a setting with non-Markovian reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Guillermo Infante , David Kuric , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez , Herke van Hoof

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) is a popular and empirically successful policy search algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). It iteratively solved the surrogate problem which restricts consecutive policies to be close to each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Sahar Roostaie , Mohammad Mehdi Ebadzadeh