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Generative models, particularly diffusion models, have achieved remarkable success in density estimation for multimodal data, drawing significant interest from the reinforcement learning (RL) community, especially in policy modeling in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Jinouwen Zhang , Rongkun Xue , Yazhe Niu , Yun Chen , Jing Yang , Hongsheng Li , Yu Liu

We propose a general framework for entropy-regularized average-reward reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our approach is based on extending the linear-programming formulation of policy optimization in MDPs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-23 Gergely Neu , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez

Reinforcement Learning(RL) with sparse rewards is a major challenge. We propose \emph{Hindsight Trust Region Policy Optimization}(HTRPO), a new RL algorithm that extends the highly successful TRPO algorithm with \emph{hindsight} to tackle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Hanbo Zhang , Site Bai , Xuguang Lan , David Hsu , Nanning Zheng

Policy optimization is a fundamental principle for designing reinforcement learning algorithms, and one example is the proximal policy optimization algorithm with a clipped surrogate objective (PPO-Clip), which has been popularly used in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-02 Nai-Chieh Huang , Ping-Chun Hsieh , Kuo-Hao Ho , Hsuan-Yu Yao , Kai-Chun Hu , Liang-Chun Ouyang , I-Chen Wu

Markov decision processes (MDPs) is viewed as an optimization of an objective function over certain linear operators over general function spaces. A new existence result is established for the existence of optimal policies in general MDPs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Abhishek Gupta , Aditya Mahajan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective in addressing complex control and decision-making tasks. However, in most traditional RL algorithms, the policy is typically parameterized as a diagonal Gaussian distribution, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Ruijie Hao , Longfei Zhang , Yang Dai , Yang Ma , Xingxing Liang , Guangquan Cheng

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a popular model-free reinforcement learning algorithm, esteemed for its simplicity and efficacy. However, due to its inherent on-policy nature, its proficiency in harnessing data from disparate policies…

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

We introduce Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization, DPPO, an algorithmic framework including best practices for fine-tuning diffusion-based policies (e.g. Diffusion Policy) in continuous control and robot learning tasks using the policy…

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as an efficient alternative to autoregressive models due to their ability to decode multiple tokens in parallel. However, aligning dLLMs with human preferences or task-specific rewards…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Chenyu Wang , Paria Rashidinejad , DiJia Su , Song Jiang , Sid Wang , Siyan Zhao , Cai Zhou , Shannon Zejiang Shen , Feiyu Chen , Tommi Jaakkola , Yuandong Tian , Bo Liu

Recent policy optimization approaches have achieved substantial empirical success by constructing surrogate optimization objectives. The Approximate Policy Iteration objective (Schulman et al., 2015a; Kakade and Langford, 2002) has become a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-31 Marcin B. Tomczak , Sergio Valcarcel Macua , Enrique Munoz de Cote , Peter Vrancx

Score-function based methods for policy learning, such as REINFORCE and PPO, have delivered strong results in game-playing and robotics, yet their high variance often undermines training stability. Using pathwise policy gradients, i.e.…

Proximal gradient algorithms (PGA), while foundational for inverse problems like image reconstruction, often yield unstable convergence and suboptimal solutions by violating the critical non-negativity constraint. We identify the gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Hanzhang Wang , Zonglin Liu , Jingyi Xu , Chenyang Wang , Zhiwei Zhong , Qiangqiang Shen

*Relative overgeneralization* (RO) occurs in cooperative multi-agent learning tasks when agents converge towards a suboptimal joint policy due to overfitting to suboptimal behavior of other agents. No methods have been proposed for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Wenshuai Zhao , Yi Zhao , Zhiyuan Li , Juho Kannala , Joni Pajarinen

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is still very challenging since it requires the agent to consider both return maximization and safe exploration. In this paper, we propose CUP, a Conservative Update Policy algorithm with a theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-16 Long Yang , Jiaming Ji , Juntao Dai , Yu Zhang , Pengfei Li , Gang Pan

Reinforcement learning has recently enabled impressive locomotion capabilities on legged robots; however, most policy architectures remain morphology- and symmetry-agnostic, leading to inefficient training and limited generalization. This…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Sizhe Wei , Xulin Chen , Fengze Xie , Garrett Ethan Katz , Zhenyu Gan , Lu Gan

Policy gradient reinforcement learning techniques enable an agent to directly learn an optimal action policy through the interactions with the environment. Nevertheless, despite its advantages, it sometimes suffers from slow convergence…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-08-05 Mohammad G. Khoshkholgh , Halim Yanikomeroglu

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has significantly advanced the training of large language models and enhanced their reasoning capabilities, while it remains susceptible to instability due to the use of hard clipping. Soft Adaptive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Egor Denisov , Svetlana Glazyrina , Maksim Kryzhanovskiy , Roman Ischenko

We introduce Phasic Policy Gradient (PPG), a reinforcement learning framework which modifies traditional on-policy actor-critic methods by separating policy and value function training into distinct phases. In prior methods, one must choose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-10 Karl Cobbe , Jacob Hilton , Oleg Klimov , John Schulman

Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong cross-scenario generalization capabilities in various robotic tasks through large-scale pre-training and task-specific fine-tuning. However, their training paradigm mainly relies…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Zengjue Chen , Runliang Niu , He Kong , Qi Wang , Qianli Xing , Zipei Fan

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