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Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most popular state-of-the-art on-policy algorithms that has become a standard baseline in modern reinforcement learning with applications in numerous fields. Though it delivers stable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Qisai Liu , Zhanhong Jiang , Hsin-Jung Yang , Mahsa Khosravi , Joshua R. Waite , Soumik Sarkar

A key challenge in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) lies in the intractability of their likelihood functions, which are essential for the RL objective, necessitating corresponding approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Nianyi Lin , Jiajie Zhang , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

Searching the space of policies directly for the optimal policy has been one popular method for solving partially observable reinforcement learning problems. Typically, with each change of the target policy, its value is estimated from the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Leonid Peshkin , Christian R. Shelton

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has become the predominant algorithm for on-policy reinforcement learning due to its scalability and empirical robustness across domains. However, there is a significant disconnect between the underlying…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become central to enhancing reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Yet on-policy algorithms such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) often suffer in early training: noisy gradients from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Ziyan Wang , Zheng Wang , Xingwei Qu , Qi Cheng , Jie Fu , Shengpu Tang , Minjia Zhang , Xiaoming Huo

Post-training with reinforcement learning (RL) has recently shown strong promise for advancing multimodal agents beyond supervised imitation. However, RL remains limited by poor data efficiency, particularly in settings where interaction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Chengxuan Lu , Zhenquan Zhang , Shukuan Wang , Qunzhi Lin , Baigui Sun , Yang Liu

Recent success in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods has shown that policy optimization with respect to an off-policy distribution via importance sampling is effective for sample reuse. In this paper, we show that the use of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Zichuan Lin , Xiapeng Wu , Mingfei Sun , Deheng Ye , Qiang Fu , Wei Yang , Wei Liu

In RL, given a prompt, we sample a group of completions from a model and score them. Two questions follow: which completions should gain probability mass, and how should the parameters move to realize that change? Standard policy-gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Jean Kaddour

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are widely used for their strong asymptotic performance and training stability, but they struggle to scale with larger batch sizes, as additional parallel environments yield redundant data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Jianren Wang , Yifan Su , Abhinav Gupta , Deepak Pathak

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) has yielded state-of-the-art results in policy search, a subfield of reinforcement learning, with one of its key points being the use of a surrogate objective function to restrict the step size at each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-07 Wangshu Zhu , Andre Rosendo

DPO (Direct Preference Optimization) has become a widely used offline preference optimization algorithm due to its simplicity and training stability. However, DPO is prone to overfitting and collapse. To address these challenges, we propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Rui Wang , Qianguo Sun , Chao Song , Junlong Wu , Tianrong Chen , Zhiyun Zeng , Yu Li

For many applications of reinforcement learning it can be more convenient to specify both a reward function and constraints, rather than trying to design behavior through the reward function. For example, systems that physically interact…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-31 Joshua Achiam , David Held , Aviv Tamar , Pieter Abbeel

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has achieved remarkable success in improving autoregressive models, especially in domains requiring correctness like mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, directly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Chenxing Wei , Jiazhen Kang , Hong Wang , Jianqing Zhang , Hao Jiang , Xiaolong Xu , Ningyuan Sun , Ying He , F. Richard Yu , Yao Shu , Bo Jiang

On-policy reinforcement learning methods, like Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), often demand extensive data per update, leading to sample inefficiency. This paper introduces Reflective Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Yaozhong Gan , Renye Yan , Zhe Wu , Junliang Xing

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is among the most widely used algorithms in reinforcement learning, which achieves state-of-the-art performance in many challenging problems. The keys to its success are the reliable policy updates through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-02 Mónika Farsang , Luca Szegletes

Offline reinforcement learning methods hold the promise of learning policies from pre-collected datasets without the need to query the environment for new transitions. This setting is particularly well-suited for continuous control robotic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-18 Xi Chen , Ali Ghadirzadeh , Tianhe Yu , Yuan Gao , Jianhao Wang , Wenzhe Li , Bin Liang , Chelsea Finn , Chongjie Zhang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected return using a given static dataset of transitions. However, offline RL faces the distribution shift problem. The policy constraint offline RL method is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Yuanhao Chen , Qi Liu , Pengbin Chen , Zhongjian Qiao , Yanjie Li

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) dominates reinforcement learning and LLM alignment but relies on a "hard clipping" mechanism that discards valuable gradients. Conversely, unconstrained methods like SPO expose the optimization to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Yiheng Zhang , Yiming Wang , Kaiyan Zhao , Zhenglin Wan , Jiayu Chen , Leong Hou U

Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Andreas Doerr , Michael Volpp , Marc Toussaint , Sebastian Trimpe , Christian Daniel

Score-function based methods for policy learning, such as REINFORCE and PPO, have delivered strong results in game-playing and robotics, yet their high variance often undermines training stability. Using pathwise policy gradients, i.e.…