Related papers: Trust-Region-Free Policy Optimization for Stochast…
Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…
Sample-based trajectory optimisers are a promising tool for the control of robotics with non-differentiable dynamics and cost functions. Contemporary approaches derive from a restricted subclass of stochastic optimal control where the…
Entropy Regularisation is a widely adopted technique that enhances policy optimisation performance and stability. A notable form of entropy regularisation is augmenting the objective with an entropy term, thereby simultaneously optimising…
On-policy reinforcement learning (RL), particularly Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has become the dominant paradigm for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). While policy ratio clipping…
Policy Optimization (PO) is a widely used approach to address continuous control tasks. In this paper, we introduce the notion of mediator feedback that frames PO as an online learning problem over the policy space. The additional available…
Policy optimization for large language models often suffers from sparse reward signals in multi-step reasoning tasks. Critic-free methods like GRPO assign a single normalized outcome reward to all tokens, providing limited guidance for…
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…
Provably efficient Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) based on optimism or posterior sampling (PSRL) is ensured to attain the global optimality asymptotically by introducing the complexity measure of the model. However, the…
Recently, test-time scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional reasoning capabilities across scientific and professional tasks by generating long chains-of-thought (CoT). As a crucial component for developing these…
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…
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is considered to be a promising approach to reduce the sample complexity that hinders model-free RL. However, the theoretical understanding of such methods has been rather limited. This paper…
We propose a trust region method for policy optimization that employs Quasi-Newton approximation for the Hessian, called Quasi-Newton Trust Region Policy Optimization QNTRPO. Gradient descent is the de facto algorithm for reinforcement…
Policy gradient methods for Large Language Models optimize a policy $\pi_\theta$ via a surrogate objective computed from samples of a rollout policy $\pi_{\text{roll}}$. However, modern LLM-RL pipelines suffer from unavoidable…
We study the problem of policy optimization (PO) with linear temporal logic (LTL) constraints. The language of LTL allows flexible description of tasks that may be unnatural to encode as a scalar cost function. We consider LTL-constrained…
Performative prediction aims to model scenarios where predictive outcomes subsequently influence the very systems they target. The pursuit of a performative optimum (PO) -- minimizing performative risk -- is generally reliant on modeling of…
This paper studies the robust optimal gain selection problem for financial trading systems, formulated within a \emph{double linear policy} framework, which allocates capital across long and short positions. The key objective is to…
We develop a trust-region method for efficiently minimizing the sum of a smooth function, a nonsmooth convex function, and the composition of a finite-valued support function with a smooth function. Optimization problems with this structure…
We consider minimizing functions for which it is expensive to compute the (possibly stochastic) gradient. Such functions are prevalent in reinforcement learning, imitation learning and adversarial training. Our target optimization framework…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) plays a pivotal role in improving the reasoning ability of large language models. However, widely used PPO surrogate objectives are fundamentally local, as they rely on a local…
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…