English
Related papers

Related papers: Generalized Munchausen Reinforcement Learning usin…

200 papers

Several applications of Reinforcement Learning suffer from instability due to high variance. This is especially prevalent in high dimensional domains. Regularization is a commonly used technique in machine learning to reduce variance, at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-12 Pierre Thodoroff , Audrey Durand , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup

Many of the recent trajectory optimization algorithms alternate between linear approximation of the system dynamics around the mean trajectory and conservative policy update. One way of constraining the policy change is by bounding the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-03 Riad Akrour , Abbas Abdolmaleki , Hany Abdulsamad , Jan Peters , Gerhard Neumann

We develop theory and algorithms for average-reward on-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL). We first consider bounding the difference of the long-term average reward for two policies. We show that previous work based on the discounted return…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Yiming Zhang , Keith W. Ross

The Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm, a state-of-the-art method in maximum entropy reinforcement learning, traditionally relies on minimizing reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence for policy updates. However, this approach leads to an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Yixian Zhang , Huaze Tang , Changxu Wei , Wenbo Ding

Quantum machine learning leverages quantum computing to enhance accuracy and reduce model complexity compared to classical approaches, promising significant advancements in various fields. Within this domain, quantum reinforcement learning…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-10-29 Nico Meyer , Julian Berberich , Christopher Mutschler , Daniel D. Scherer

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising approach to improve the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Among RLVR algorithms, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and its variants…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Zhaokang Liao , Yingguo Gao , Yi Yang , Yongheng Hu , Jingting Ding

$\alpha$-posteriors and their variational approximations distort standard posterior inference by downweighting the likelihood and introducing variational approximation errors. We show that such distortions, if tuned appropriately, reduce…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-04-20 Marco Avella Medina , José Luis Montiel Olea , Cynthia Rush , Amilcar Velez

Imitation learning (IL) consists of a set of tools that leverage expert demonstrations to quickly learn policies. However, if the expert is suboptimal, IL can yield policies with inferior performance compared to reinforcement learning (RL).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-29 Ching-An Cheng , Xinyan Yan , Nolan Wagener , Byron Boots

We consider the task of building strong but human-like policies in multi-agent decision-making problems, given examples of human behavior. Imitation learning is effective at predicting human actions but may not match the strength of expert…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Athul Paul Jacob , David J. Wu , Gabriele Farina , Adam Lerer , Hengyuan Hu , Anton Bakhtin , Jacob Andreas , Noam Brown

We propose to solve large scale Markowitz mean-variance (MV) portfolio allocation problem using reinforcement learning (RL). By adopting the recently developed continuous-time exploratory control framework, we formulate the exploratory MV…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2019-08-05 Haoran Wang

Self-supervised reinforcement learning (RL) presents a promising approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) without reliance on expensive human-annotated data. However, we find that existing methods…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Bizhe Bai , Hongming Wu , Peng Ye , Tao Chen

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework to optimize a control policy using rewards that are revealed by the system as a response to a control action. In its standard form, RL involves a single agent that uses its policy to accomplish a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-11-24 Juan Cervino , Juan Andres Bazerque , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro

We generalise the classical Pinsker inequality which relates variational divergence to Kullback-Liebler divergence in two ways: we consider arbitrary f-divergences in place of KL divergence, and we assume knowledge of a sequence of values…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2009-06-09 Mark D. Reid , Robert C. Williamson

Reinforcement learning (RL) is frequently employed in fine-tuning large language models (LMs), such as GPT-3, to penalize them for undesirable features of generated sequences, such as offensiveness, social bias, harmfulness or falsehood.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Tomasz Korbak , Ethan Perez , Christopher L Buckley

As large language models advance toward superhuman performance, ensuring their alignment with human values and abilities grows increasingly complex. Weak-to-strong generalization offers a promising approach by leveraging predictions from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Wei Yao , Wenkai Yang , Ziqiao Wang , Yankai Lin , Yong Liu

Mirror descent value iteration (MDVI), an abstraction of Kullback-Leibler (KL) and entropy-regularized reinforcement learning (RL), has served as the basis for recent high-performing practical RL algorithms. However, despite the use of…

Alignment and adaptation in large language models heavily rely on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF); yet, theoretical understanding of its generalisability remains premature, especially when the learned reward could shift,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Kenton Tang , Yuzhu Chen , Fengxiang He

Many offline reinforcement learning algorithms are underpinned by $f$-divergence regularization, but their sample complexity *defined with respect to regularized objectives* still lacks tight analyses, especially in terms of concrete data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Qingyue Zhao , Kaixuan Ji , Heyang Zhao , Tong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

Normalizing flows can generate complex target distributions and thus show promise in many applications in Bayesian statistics as an alternative or complement to MCMC for sampling posteriors. Since no data set from the target posterior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-19 Marylou Gabrié , Grant M. Rotskoff , Eric Vanden-Eijnden

Estimating Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence from samples of two distributions is essential in many machine learning problems. Variational methods using neural network discriminator have been proposed to achieve this task in a scalable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-01 Sandesh Ghimire , Aria Masoomi , Jennifer Dy