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We propose Orthogonalized Policy Optimization (OPO), a principled framework for large language model alignment derived from optimization in the Hilbert function space L2(pi_k). Lifting policy updates from the probability simplex into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Wang Zixian

Policy optimization methods are powerful algorithms in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for their flexibility to deal with policy parameterization and ability to handle model misspecification. However, these methods usually suffer from slow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-19 Yunfan Li , Yiran Wang , Yu Cheng , Lin Yang

In many real-world scenarios, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are trained on data with dynamics shift, i.e., with different underlying environment dynamics. A majority of current methods address such issue by training context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Zhenghai Xue , Qingpeng Cai , Shuchang Liu , Dong Zheng , Peng Jiang , Kun Gai , Bo An

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has become the predominant algorithm for on-policy reinforcement learning due to its scalability and empirical robustness across domains. However, there is a significant disconnect between the underlying…

This paper studies the adaptive optimal stationary control of continuous-time linear stochastic systems with both additive and multiplicative noises, using reinforcement learning techniques. Based on policy iteration, a novel off-policy…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-12-07 Bo Pang , Zhong-Ping Jiang

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 (RL), particularly Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has become the dominant paradigm for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). While policy ratio clipping…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Yu Luo , Shuo Han , Yihan Hu , Dong Li , Jianye Hao

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become central to enhancing reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Yet on-policy algorithms such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) often suffer in early training: noisy gradients from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Ziyan Wang , Zheng Wang , Xingwei Qu , Qi Cheng , Jie Fu , Shengpu Tang , Minjia Zhang , Xiaoming Huo

We introduce \texttt{OPO-CMDP}, the first policy optimization algorithm for stochastic Contextual Markov Decision Process (CMDPs) under general offline function approximation. Our approach achieves a high probability regret bound of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Orin Levy , Aviv Rosenberg , Alon Cohen , Yishay Mansour

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) has yielded state-of-the-art results in policy search, a subfield of reinforcement learning, with one of its key points being the use of a surrogate objective function to restrict the step size at each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-07 Wangshu Zhu , Andre Rosendo

In many applications of Reinforcement Learning (RL), it is critically important that the algorithm performs safely, such that instantaneous hard constraints are satisfied at each step, and unsafe states and actions are avoided. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Ming Shi , Yingbin Liang , Ness Shroff

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to improve complex reasoning abilities. However, state-of-the-art policy optimization methods often suffer from high computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Kianté Brantley , Mingyu Chen , Zhaolin Gao , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun , Wenhao Zhan , Xuezhou Zhang

Decision-making under distribution shift is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment environments differ. We study this problem through the lens of robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Jingwen Gu , Yiting He , Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

Safe reinforcement learning (safe RL) aims to respect safety requirements while optimizing long-term performance. In many practical applications, however, the problem involves an infinite number of constraints, known as semi-infinite safe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Jiaming Zhang , Yujie Yang , Haoning Wang , Liping Zhang , Shengbo Eben Li

While reinforcement learning (RL) has been central to the recent success of large language models (LLMs), RL optimization is notoriously unstable, especially when compared to supervised fine-tuning (SFT). In this work, we investigate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Hongzhan Chen , Tao Yang , Yuhua Zhu , Shiping Gao , Xiaojun Quan , Ting Yao

By leveraging differentiable dynamics, Reparameterization Policy Gradient (RPG) achieves high sample efficiency. However, current approaches are hindered by two critical limitations: the under-utilization of computationally expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Hai Zhong , Xun Wang , Zhuoran Li , Longbo Huang

Since DeepSeek-R1 popularized, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become the core part of training Reasoning LLMs. However, we find some deficiency that influences RL stability and inference efficiency, like zero-variance in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Chen Li , Nazhou Liu , Kai Yang

Very recently proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithms have been proposed as first-order optimization methods for effective reinforcement learning. While PPO is inspired by the same learning theory that justifies trust region policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-20 Gang Chen , Yiming Peng , Mengjie Zhang

Policy optimization methods with function approximation are widely used in multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, it remains elusive how to design such algorithms with statistical guarantees. Leveraging a multi-agent performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Yulai Zhao , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Jason D. Lee

Safe exploration is a key to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in safety-critical systems. Existing safe exploration methods guaranteed safety under the assumption of regularity, and it has been difficult to apply them to large-scale…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Akifumi Wachi , Yunyue Wei , Yanan Sui