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Recent advancements in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), exemplified by DeepSeek-R1, have underscored the potential of scaling inference-time compute through Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). However, GRPO frequently suffers from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Yu Zhao , Fan Jiang , Tianle Liu , Bo Zeng , Yu Liu , Longyue Wang , Weihua Luo

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

Policy-based methods have achieved remarkable success in solving challenging reinforcement learning problems. Among these methods, off-policy policy gradient methods are particularly important due to that they can benefit from off-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Wenjia Meng , Qian Zheng , Long Yang , Yilong Yin , Gang Pan

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a promising solution to align large language models (LLMs) more closely with human values. Off-policy preference optimization, where the preference data is obtained from other models, is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Wenxuan Zhou , Ravi Agrawal , Shujian Zhang , Sathish Reddy Indurthi , Sanqiang Zhao , Kaiqiang Song , Silei Xu , Chenguang Zhu

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

Optimal policies in standard MDPs can be obtained using either value iteration or policy iteration. However, in the case of zero-sum Markov games, there is no efficient policy iteration algorithm; e.g., it has been shown that one has to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Anna Winnicki , R. Srikant

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved breakthrough results on many tasks, but agents often fail to generalize beyond the environment they were trained in. As a result, deep RL algorithms that promote generalization are receiving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-18 Charles Packer , Katelyn Gao , Jernej Kos , Philipp Krähenbühl , Vladlen Koltun , Dawn Song

Reinforcement learning (RL) is already widely applied to applications such as robotics, but it is only sparsely used in sensor management. In this paper, we apply the popular Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) approach to a multi-agent UAV…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-21 André Brandenburger , Folker Hoffmann , Alexander Charlish

Reinforcement learning algorithms can show strong variation in performance between training runs with different random seeds. In this paper we explore how this affects hyperparameter optimization when the goal is to find hyperparameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-31 Lars Hertel , Pierre Baldi , Daniel L. Gillen

At first sight it may seem straightforward to use recurrent layers in Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms to enable agents to make use of memory in the setting of partially observable environments. Starting from widely used Proximal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Marco Pleines , Matthias Pallasch , Frank Zimmer , Mike Preuss

Although deep reinforcement learning methods can learn effective policies for challenging problems such as Atari games and robotics tasks, algorithms are complex, and training times are often long. This study investigates how Evolution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Annie Wong , Jacob de Nobel , Thomas Bäck , Aske Plaat , Anna V. Kononova

Advantage Actor-critic (A2C) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are popular deep reinforcement learning algorithms used for game AI in recent years. A common understanding is that A2C and PPO are separate algorithms because PPO's…

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have high sample complexity while off-policy algorithms are difficult to tune. Merging the two holds the promise to develop efficient algorithms that generalize across diverse environments.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-17 Rasool Fakoor , Pratik Chaudhari , Alexander J. Smola

Post-deployment machine learning algorithms often influence the environments they act in, and thus shift the underlying dynamics that the standard reinforcement learning (RL) methods ignore. While designing optimal algorithms in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Debabrota Basu , Udvas Das , Brahim Driss , Uddalak Mukherjee

In sequence generation task, many works use policy gradient for model optimization to tackle the intractable backpropagation issue when maximizing the non-differentiable evaluation metrics or fooling the discriminator in adversarial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-08-27 Yi-Lin Tuan , Jinzhi Zhang , Yujia Li , Hung-yi Lee

Deep reinforcement learning has been shown to be a powerful framework for learning policies from complex high-dimensional sensory inputs to actions in complex tasks, such as the Atari domain. In this paper, we explore output representation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-16 Ishan P. Durugkar , Clemens Rosenbaum , Stefan Dernbach , Sridhar Mahadevan

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models such as OpenVLA, Octo, and $\pi_0$ have shown strong generalization by leveraging large-scale demonstrations, yet their performance is still fundamentally constrained by the quality and coverage of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Mingyang Lyu , Yinqian Sun , Erliang Lin , Huangrui Li , Ruolin Chen , Feifei Zhao , Yi Zeng

Yahtzee is a classic dice game with a stochastic, combinatorial structure and delayed rewards, making it an interesting mid-scale RL benchmark. While an optimal policy for solitaire Yahtzee can be computed using dynamic programming methods,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Nicholas A. Pape

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

Residual policy learning (RPL), in which a learned policy refines a static base policy using deep reinforcement learning (DRL), has shown strong performance across various robotic applications. Its effectiveness is particularly evident in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Raphael Trumpp , Denis Hoornaert , Mirco Theile , Marco Caccamo