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Reinforcement Learning (RL) can directly enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models without extensive reliance on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this work, we revisit the traditional Policy Gradient (PG) mechanism and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Xiangxiang Chu , Hailang Huang , Xiao Zhang , Fei Wei , Yong Wang

In e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and TaoBao, ranking items in a search session is a typical multi-step decision-making problem. Learning to rank (LTR) methods have been widely applied to ranking problems. However, such methods often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-24 Yujing Hu , Qing Da , Anxiang Zeng , Yang Yu , Yinghui Xu

Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Cevahir Koprulu , Ufuk Topcu

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

Power grid load scheduling is a critical task that ensures the balance between electricity generation and consumption while minimizing operational costs and maintaining grid stability. Traditional optimization methods often struggle with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Dongwen Luo

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework under a broad class of risk objectives, characterized by convex scoring functions. This class covers many common risk measures, such as variance, Expected Shortfall, entropic Value-at-Risk,…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-05-16 Shanyu Han , Yang Liu , Xiang Yu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach to learn an optimal dialog policy for task-oriented visual dialog systems. A common practice is to apply RL on a neural sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) framework with the action space…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Mingyang Zhou , Josh Arnold , Zhou Yu

Though reinforcement learning has greatly benefited from the incorporation of neural networks, the inability to verify the correctness of such systems limits their use. Current work in explainable deep learning focuses on explaining only a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-30 Nicholay Topin , Manuela Veloso

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently been introduced to interactive recommender systems (IRS) because of its nature of learning from dynamic interactions and planning for long-run performance. As IRS is always with thousands of items to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-15 Haokun Chen , Xinyi Dai , Han Cai , Weinan Zhang , Xuejian Wang , Ruiming Tang , Yuzhou Zhang , Yong Yu

Robotic systems must be able to quickly and robustly make decisions when operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be used to compute optimal policies with little prior knowledge about the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-09-13 Yunpeng Pan , Xinyan Yan , Evangelos Theodorou , Byron Boots

We work towards a unifying paradigm for accelerating policy optimization methods in reinforcement learning (RL) by integrating foresight in the policy improvement step via optimistic and adaptive updates. Leveraging the connection between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-07 Veronica Chelu , Tom Zahavy , Arthur Guez , Doina Precup , Sebastian Flennerhag

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has emerged as one of the most effective ways to improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) in downstream tasks. However, SFT can have difficulty generalizing when the underlying data distribution…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Mrinal Rawat , Arkajyoti Chakraborty , Neha Gupta , Roberto Pieraccini

As a key component to intuitive cognition and reasoning solutions in human intelligence, causal knowledge provides great potential for reinforcement learning (RL) agents' interpretability towards decision-making by helping reduce the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Ruichu Cai , Siyang Huang , Jie Qiao , Wei Chen , Yan Zeng , Keli Zhang , Fuchun Sun , Yang Yu , Zhifeng Hao

We present on-line policy gradient algorithms for computing the locally optimal policy of a constrained, average cost, finite state Markov Decision Process. The stochastic approximation algorithms require estimation of the gradient of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-18 Vikram Krishnamurthy , Felisa Vazquez Abad

Achieving safe and coordinated behavior in dynamic, constraint-rich environments remains a major challenge for learning-based control. Pure end-to-end learning often suffers from poor sample efficiency and limited reliability, while…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-10 Max Studt , Georg Schildbach

While reinforcement learning has been increasingly applied to stochastic control, few studies have systematically examined policy-based methods in queuing environments modeled as a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP). To address this gap,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-28 Joseph Walton , Gabriel Nicolosi

Policy-based algorithms are among the most widely adopted techniques in model-free RL, thanks to their strong theoretical groundings and good properties in continuous action spaces. Unfortunately, these methods require precise and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Luca Sabbioni , Francesco Corda , Marcello Restelli

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

Current reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be brittle and difficult to use, especially when learning goal-reaching behaviors from sparse rewards. Although supervised imitation learning provides a simple and stable alternative, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Dibya Ghosh , Abhishek Gupta , Ashwin Reddy , Justin Fu , Coline Devin , Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine

We study policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning in non-Markovian decision processes (NMDPs), where observations and rewards depend on the entire interaction history. To handle this dependence, the agent maintains an internal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Avik Kar , Siddharth Chandak , Rahul Singh , Soumitra Sinhahajari , Eric Moulines , Shalabh Bhatnagar , Nicholas Bambos