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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

Policy gradient methods are a vital ingredient behind the success of modern reinforcement learning. Modern policy gradient methods, although successful, introduce a residual error in gradient estimation. In this work, we argue that this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Pulkit Katdare , Anant Joshi , Katherine Driggs-Campbell

Policy gradient lies at the core of deep reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous domains. Despite much success, it is often observed in practice that RL training with policy gradient can fail for many reasons, even on standard control…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Tao Wang , Sylvia Herbert , Sicun Gao

Gradient-based methods have been widely used for system design and optimization in diverse application domains. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in studying theoretical properties of these methods in the context of control and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-11 Bin Hu , Kaiqing Zhang , Na Li , Mehran Mesbahi , Maryam Fazel , Tamer Başar

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

Reinforcement learning techniques leveraging deep learning have made tremendous progress in recent years. However, the complexity of neural networks prevents practitioners from understanding their behavior. Decision trees have gained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Daniël Vos , Sicco Verwer

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods for large-scale reinforcement learning, and their empirical success has prompted several works that develop the foundation of their global convergence theory. However, prior works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Junzi Zhang , Jongho Kim , Brendan O'Donoghue , Stephen Boyd

We consider the problem of learning control policies that optimize a reward function while satisfying constraints due to considerations of safety, fairness, or other costs. We propose a new algorithm, Projection-Based Constrained Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has been proposed as a promising alternative to Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) based Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). However, empirical evaluations consistently reveal suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Qinwei Ma , Jingzhe Shi , Can Jin , Jenq-Neng Hwang , Serge Belongie , Lei Li

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

A novel optimization approach is proposed for application to policy gradient methods and evolution strategies for reinforcement learning (RL). The procedure uses a computationally efficient Wasserstein natural gradient (WNG) descent that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Ted Moskovitz , Michael Arbel , Ferenc Huszar , Arthur Gretton

As the most successful variant and improvement for Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO), proximal policy optimization (PPO) has been widely applied across various domains with several advantages: efficient data utilization, easy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-15 Xiangxiang Chu

We study reinforcement learning in hybrid discrete-continuous action spaces, such as settings where the discrete component selects a regime (or index) and the continuous component optimizes within it -- a structure common in robotics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Matias Alvo , Daniel Russo , Yash Kanoria

Reinforcement Learning, particularly through policy gradient methods, has played a central role in enabling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, the optimization stability of policy gradients in this setting remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Luckeciano C. Melo , Alessandro Abate , Yarin Gal

Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-10 Ruiyi Zhang , Changyou Chen , Chunyuan Li , Lawrence Carin

While originally developed for continuous control problems, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has emerged as the work-horse of a variety of reinforcement learning (RL) applications, including the fine-tuning of generative models.…

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) learns a reward function to explain expert demonstrations. Modern IRL methods often use the adversarial (minimax) formulation that alternates between reward and policy optimization, which often lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Yang Chen , Menglin Zou , Jiaqi Zhang , Yitan Zhang , Junyi Yang , Gael Gendron , Libo Zhang , Jiamou Liu , Michael J. Witbrock

Decision trees are ubiquitous in machine learning for their ease of use and interpretability. Yet, these models are not typically employed in reinforcement learning as they cannot be updated online via stochastic gradient descent. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-29 Andrew Silva , Taylor Killian , Ivan Dario Jimenez Rodriguez , Sung-Hyun Son , Matthew Gombolay

Direct optimization is an appealing framework that replaces integration with optimization of a random objective for approximating gradients in models with discrete random variables. A$^\star$ sampling is a framework for optimizing such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Guy Lorberbom , Chris J. Maddison , Nicolas Heess , Tamir Hazan , Daniel Tarlow

Novel advanced policy gradient (APG) methods, such as Trust Region policy optimization and Proximal policy optimization (PPO), have become the dominant reinforcement learning algorithms because of their ease of implementation and good…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-22 J. G. Dai , Mark Gluzman