Related papers: Provably Convergent Policy Optimization via Metric…
Wasserstein policy gradient (WPG) is a policy optimization method for reinforcement learning (RL) that exploits the optimal-transport geometry of action distributions. For the entropy-regularized RL objective, WPG evolves each…
Trust region-based optimization methods have become foundational reinforcement learning algorithms that offer stability and strong empirical performance in continuous control tasks. Growing interest in scalable and reusable control policies…
We introduce a constrained optimization method for policy gradient reinforcement learning, which uses a virtual trust region to regulate each policy update. In addition to using the proximity of one single old policy as the normal trust…
Off-policy evaluation and learning are concerned with assessing a given policy and learning an optimal policy from offline data without direct interaction with the environment. Often, the environment in which the data are collected differs…
As the complexity of modern control systems increases, it becomes challenging to derive an accurate model of the uncertainty that affects their dynamics. Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) provides a powerful framework…
Trust region methods are a popular tool in reinforcement learning as they yield robust policy updates in continuous and discrete action spaces. However, enforcing such trust regions in deep reinforcement learning is difficult. Hence, many…
Standard on-policy reinforcement learning relies on heuristic clipping to enforce trust regions, but this mechanism imposes a severe cost by indiscriminately truncating high-return yet high-divergence updates. We demonstrate that explicitly…
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…
GRPO-style reinforcement learning (RL)-based LLM fine-tuning algorithms have recently gained popularity. Relying on heuristic trust-region approximations, however, they can lead to brittle optimization behavior, as global importance-ratio…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…
Finding optimal policies for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) is challenging due to their uncountable state spaces when transformed into fully observable Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) using belief states.…
Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a popular framework for optimizing black-box functions. Despite its effectiveness, BO is often inefficient for high-dimensional problems due to the exponential growth of the search space, heterogeneity of the…
Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) is a popular and empirically successful policy search algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). It iteratively solved the surrogate problem which restricts consecutive policies to be close to each…
Policy gradients methods often achieve better performance when the change in policy is limited to a small Kullback-Leibler divergence. We derive policy gradients where the change in policy is limited to a small Wasserstein distance (or…
Two-player games such as board games have long been used as traditional benchmarks for reinforcement learning. This work revisits a policy optimization method with reverse Kullback-Leibler regularization and entropy regularization and…
Standard trust-region methods constrain policy updates via Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. However, KL controls only an average divergence and does not directly prevent rare, large likelihood-ratio excursions that destabilize…
Despite Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) dominating policy gradient methods -- from robotic control to game AI -- its static trust region forces a brittle trade-off: aggressive clipping stifles early exploration, while late-stage updates…
A major challenge in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is the issue of distribution shift. LLM alignment algorithms rely on static preference datasets, assuming that they accurately represent real-world user…
To ensure stability of learning, state-of-the-art generalized policy iteration algorithms augment the policy improvement step with a trust region constraint bounding the information loss. The size of the trust region is commonly determined…
This monograph develops a comprehensive statistical learning framework that is robust to (distributional) perturbations in the data using Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) under the Wasserstein metric. Beginning with fundamental…