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While policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) achieves tremendous successes in practice, it is significantly less understood in theory, especially compared with value-based RL. In particular, it remains elusive how to design a provably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Qi Cai , Zhuoran Yang , Chi Jin , Zhaoran Wang

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are among the most successful policy gradient approaches in deep reinforcement learning (RL). While these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ahmed Touati , Amy Zhang , Joelle Pineau , Pascal Vincent

Chemical process optimization and control are affected by 1) plant-model mismatch, 2) process disturbances, and 3) constraints for safe operation. Reinforcement learning by policy optimization would be a natural way to solve this due to its…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have shown tremendous success in simulation environments, but their application to real-world problems faces significant challenges, with safety being a major concern. In particular, enforcing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Weiye Zhao , Rui Chen , Yifan Sun , Tianhao Wei , Changliu Liu

In this paper, we present an online reinforcement learning algorithm for constrained Markov decision processes with a safety constraint. Despite the necessary attention of the scientific community, considering stochastic stopping time, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Abhijit Mazumdar , Rafal Wisniewski , Manuela L. Bujorianu

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

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

We study the safe reinforcement learning problem with nonlinear function approximation, where policy optimization is formulated as a constrained optimization problem with both the objective and the constraint being nonconvex functions. For…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Ming Yu , Zhuoran Yang , Mladen Kolar , Zhaoran Wang

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), as the widely employed policy based reinforcement learning (RL) methods, are prone to converge to a sub-optimal solution as they limit the policy representation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Jun Song , Chaoyue Zhao

We propose a new sample-efficient methodology, called Supervised Policy Update (SPU), for deep reinforcement learning. Starting with data generated by the current policy, SPU formulates and solves a constrained optimization problem in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Quan Vuong , Yiming Zhang , Keith W. Ross

One of the key challenges to deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) is to ensure safety at both training and testing phases. In this work, we propose a novel technique of unsupervised action planning to improve the safety of on-policy…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Hao-Lun Hsu , Qiuhua Huang , Sehoon Ha

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

We present a proximal policy optimization (PPO) agent trained through curriculum learning (CL) principles and meticulous reward engineering to optimize a real-world high-throughput waste sorting facility. Our work addresses the challenge of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Abhijeet Pendyala , Asma Atamna , Tobias Glasmachers

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) excels in various control tasks, yet the absence of safety guarantees hampers its real-world applicability. In particular, explorations during learning usually results in safety violations, while the RL…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Yifan Sun , Feihan Li , Weiye Zhao , Rui Chen , Tianhao Wei , Changliu Liu

Advances in reinforcement learning (RL) often rely on massive compute resources and remain notoriously sample inefficient. In contrast, the human brain is able to efficiently learn effective control strategies using limited resources. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Burcu Küçükoğlu , Walraaf Borkent , Bodo Rueckauer , Nasir Ahmad , Umut Güçlü , Marcel van Gerven

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Penghui Qi , Xiangxin Zhou , Zichen Liu , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Min Lin , Wee Sun Lee

Ensuring safety is important for the practical deployment of reinforcement learning (RL). Various challenges must be addressed, such as handling stochasticity in the environments, providing rigorous guarantees of persistent state-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Milan Ganai , Zheng Gong , Chenning Yu , Sylvia Herbert , Sicun Gao

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is among the most widely used deep reinforcement learning algorithms, yet its theoretical foundations remain incomplete. Most importantly, convergence and understanding of fundamental PPO advantages remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Leif Doering , Daniel Schmidt , Moritz Melcher , Sebastian Kassing , Benedikt Wille , Tilman Aach , Simon Weissmann

We introduce a constrained optimization method for policy gradient reinforcement learning, which uses a virtual trust region to regulate each policy update. In addition to using the proximity of one single old policy as the normal trust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Hung Le , Thommen Karimpanal George , Majid Abdolshah , Dung Nguyen , Kien Do , Sunil Gupta , Svetha Venkatesh

Autonomous exploration of obstacle-rich spaces requires strategies that ensure efficiency while guaranteeing safety against collisions with obstacles. This paper investigates a novel platform-agnostic reinforcement learning framework that…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Gabriele Calzolari , Vidya Sumathy , Christoforos Kanellakis , George Nikolakopoulos