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A common technique in reinforcement learning is to evaluate the value function from Monte Carlo simulations of a given policy, and use the estimated value function to obtain a new policy which is greedy with respect to the estimated value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Anna Winnicki , R. Srikant

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) enhances Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning but suffers from advantage collapse on ``hard samples'' where all rollouts fail. This lack of variance eliminates crucial learning signals.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Xinyu Lu , Kaiqi Zhang , Jinglin Yang , Boxi Cao , Yaojie Lu , Hongyu Lin , Min He , Xianpei Han , Le Sun

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), especially in scenarios where supervised fine-tuning (SFT) falls short due to limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Jian Xiong , Jingbo Zhou , Jingyong Ye , Qiang Huang , Dejing Dou

To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) addresses sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints. In this setting, policy-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Alessandro Montenegro , Leonardo Cesani , Marco Mussi , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli

We propose a successive convex approximation based off-policy optimization (SCAOPO) algorithm to solve the general constrained reinforcement learning problem, which is formulated as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-20 Chang Tian , An Liu , Guang Huang , Wu Luo

The policy gradient method enjoys the simplicity of the objective where the agent optimizes the cumulative reward directly. Moreover, in the continuous action domain, parameterized distribution of action distribution allows easy control of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Md Masudur Rahman , Yexiang Xue

The goal of robust constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is to optimize an agent's performance under the worst-case model uncertainty while satisfying safety or resource constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate that strong duality does…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Shaocong Ma , Ziyi Chen , Yi Zhou , Heng Huang

Online on-policy preference learning algorithms for language model alignment such as online direct policy optimization (DPO) can significantly outperform their offline counterparts. We provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Juno Kim , Jihun Yun , Jason D. Lee , Kwang-Sung Jun

The challenge in the widely applicable online matching problem lies in making irrevocable assignments while there is uncertainty about future inputs. Most theoretically-grounded policies are myopic or greedy in nature. In real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Mohammad Ali Alomrani , Reza Moravej , Elias B. Khalil

Policy optimization methods have shown great promise in solving complex reinforcement and imitation learning tasks. While model-free methods are broadly applicable, they often require many samples to optimize complex policies. Model-based…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-23 Daniel Levy , Stefano Ermon

Policy-gradient methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are typically updated along a single stochastic gradient direction, leaving the rich local structure of the parameter space unexplored. Previous work has shown that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Xinyu Zhang , Aishik Deb , Klaus Mueller

Searching the space of policies directly for the optimal policy has been one popular method for solving partially observable reinforcement learning problems. Typically, with each change of the target policy, its value is estimated from the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Leonid Peshkin , Christian R. Shelton

Expressive generative models have advanced robotic manipulation by capturing complex, multi-modal action distributions over temporally extended trajectories. However, fine-tuning these policies via RL remains challenging due to instability…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Yuhui Chen , Haoran Li , Zhennan Jiang , Yuxing Qin , Yuxuan Wan , Weiheng Liu , Dongbin Zhao

The difficulty in specifying rewards for many real-world problems has led to an increased focus on learning rewards from human feedback, such as demonstrations. However, there are often many different reward functions that explain the human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Zaynah Javed , Daniel S. Brown , Satvik Sharma , Jerry Zhu , Ashwin Balakrishna , Marek Petrik , Anca D. Dragan , Ken Goldberg

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), also known as batch RL, aims to optimize policy from a large pre-recorded dataset without interaction with the environment. This setting offers the promise of utilizing diverse, pre-collected datasets to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Qiang He , Xinwen Hou

Tackling large approximate dynamic programming or reinforcement learning problems requires methods that can exploit regularities, or intrinsic structure, of the problem in hand. Most current methods are geared towards exploiting the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-07-03 Amir-massoud Farahmand , Doina Precup , André M. S. Barreto , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

In reinforcement learning, robust policies for high-stakes decision-making problems with limited data are usually computed by optimizing the percentile criterion, which minimizes the probability of a catastrophic failure. Unfortunately,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Elita A. Lobo , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Marek Petrik

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models (LLMs). Current RLVR methods often overemphasize exploitation, leading to entropy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Liang Chen , Xueting Han , Qizhou Wang , Bo Han , Jing Bai , Hinrich Schutze , Kam-Fai Wong

Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Alexander W. Goodall , Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli