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Entropy regularized algorithms such as Soft Q-learning and Soft Actor-Critic, recently showed state-of-the-art performance on a number of challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. The regularized formulation modifies the standard RL…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-15 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a popular deep policy gradient algorithm. In standard implementations, PPO regularizes policy updates with clipped probability ratios, and parameterizes policies with either continuous Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Chloe Ching-Yun Hsu , Celestine Mendler-Dünner , Moritz Hardt

This paper presents a novel algorithm for the continuous control of dynamical systems that combines Trajectory Optimization (TO) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) in a single framework. The motivations behind this algorithm are the two main…

Behavior Regularized Policy Optimization (BRPO) leverages asymmetric (divergence) regularization to mitigate the distribution shift in offline Reinforcement Learning. This paper is the first to study the open question of symmetric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Lingwei Zhu , Haseeb Shah , Zheng Chen , Yukie Nagai , Martha White

Reinforcement learning (RL) in large environments often suffers from severe computational bottlenecks, as conventional regret minimization algorithms require repeated, costly calls to planning and statistical estimation oracles. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Haichen Hu , Jian Qian , David Simchi-Levi

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable Markov decision processes. In particular, we aim to learn an optimal policy from a dataset collected by a behavior policy which possibly depends on the latent state. Such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Miao Lu , Yifei Min , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Most offline RL algorithms return optimal policies but do not provide statistical guarantees on desirable behaviors. This could generate reliability issues in safety-critical applications, such as in some multiagent domains where agents,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Edoardo Zorzi , Alberto Castellini , Leonidas Bakopoulos , Georgios Chalkiadakis , Alessandro Farinelli

This paper presents the concept of an adaptive safe padding that forces Reinforcement Learning (RL) to synthesise optimal control policies while ensuring safety during the learning process. Policies are synthesised to satisfy a goal,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Mohammadhosein Hasanbeig , Alessandro Abate , Daniel Kroening

Solving tasks in Reinforcement Learning is no easy feat. As the goal of the agent is to maximize the accumulated reward, it often learns to exploit loopholes and misspecifications in the reward signal resulting in unwanted behavior. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Chen Tessler , Daniel J. Mankowitz , Shie Mannor

Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm employing a clipped surrogate objective (PPO-Clip) is a prominent exemplar of the policy optimization methods. However, despite its remarkable empirical success, PPO-Clip lacks theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Nai-Chieh Huang , Ping-Chun Hsieh , Kuo-Hao Ho , I-Chen Wu

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has been positioned by recent literature as the canonical method for the RL part of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). PPO performs well empirically but has a heuristic motivation and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Dipan Maity

Traditional reinforcement learning usually assumes either episodic interactions with resets or continuous operation to minimize average or cumulative loss. While episodic settings have many theoretical results, resets are often unrealistic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-13 Bianca Marin Moreno , Margaux Brégère , Pierre Gaillard , Nadia Oudjane

In many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, we want policies that reach desired states and then keep the controlled system within an acceptable region around the desired states over an indefinite period of time. This latter objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Brahma S. Pavse , Matthew Zurek , Yudong Chen , Qiaomin Xie , Josiah P. Hanna

We propose a novel randomized linear programming algorithm for approximating the optimal policy of the discounted Markov decision problem. By leveraging the value-policy duality and binary-tree data structures, the algorithm adaptively…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-04 Mengdi Wang

We introduce a novel theoretical framework for Return On Investment (ROI) maximization in repeated decision-making. Our setting is motivated by the use case of companies that regularly receive proposals for technological innovations and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-24 Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Tommaso Cesari , Yishay Mansour , Vianney Perchet

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) methods in offline domains without additional online data collection, such as mobile health applications. Most of existing policy optimization algorithms in the computer science literature are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-28 Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo , Yuan Le , Hongtu Zhu , Rui Song

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 popular Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm approximates the solution in a clipped policy space. Does there exist better policies outside of this space? By using a novel surrogate objective that employs the sigmoid function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Xing Chen , Dongcui Diao , Hechang Chen , Hengshuai Yao , Haiyin Piao , Zhixiao Sun , Zhiwei Yang , Randy Goebel , Bei Jiang , Yi Chang

Following the recent resurgence in establishing linear control theoretic benchmarks for reinforcement leaning (RL)-based policy optimization (PO) for complex dynamical systems with continuous state and action spaces, an optimal control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-30 Leilei Cui , Lekan Molu

Policy optimization is an effective reinforcement learning approach to solve continuous control tasks. Recent achievements have shown that alternating online and offline optimization is a successful choice for efficient trajectory reuse.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-01 Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini , Francesco Faccio , Marcello Restelli