English
Related papers

Related papers: Clipped-Objective Policy Gradients for Pessimistic…

200 papers

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…

By leveraging differentiable dynamics, Reparameterization Policy Gradient (RPG) achieves high sample efficiency. However, current approaches are hindered by two critical limitations: the under-utilization of computationally expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Hai Zhong , Xun Wang , Zhuoran Li , Longbo Huang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yu Luo , Shuo Han , Yihan Hu , Lei Lv , Huaping Liu , Fuchun Sun , Jianye Hao , Dong Li

A significant portion of recent research on Large Language Model (LLM) alignment focuses on developing new policy optimization methods based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Two prominent directions have emerged: (i) a shift…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Svetlana Glazyrina , Maksim Kryzhanovskiy , Roman Ischenko

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), due to the deterministic verification, becomes a dominant paradigm for enhancing the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). The community witnesses the rapid change from the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Mingwei Xu , Hao Fang

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.…

The problem of constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) holds significant importance as it provides a framework for addressing critical safety satisfaction concerns in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). However, with the introduction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Chengbin Xuan , Feng Zhang , Faliang Yin , Hak-Keung Lam

In importance sampling (IS)-based reinforcement learning algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), IS weights are typically clipped to avoid large variance in learning. However, policy update from clipped statistics induces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-30 Seungyul Han , Youngchul Sung

Policy-based reinforcement learning algorithms are widely used in various fields. Among them, mainstream policy optimization algorithms such as TRPO and PPO introduce importance sampling into policy iteration, which allows the reuse of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Zhengpeng Xie , Changdong Yu , Weizheng Qiao

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…

On-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithms have low data utilization and require significant experience for policy improvement. This paper proposes a proximal policy optimization algorithm with prioritized trajectory replay (PTR-PPO)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-09 Xingxing Liang , Yang Ma , Yanghe Feng , Zhong Liu

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a practical route to improve large language model reasoning, and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a widely used optimizer in this setting. However, RLVR training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Tue Le , Linh Ngo Van , Trung Le

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

While policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) achieves tremendous successes in practice, it is significantly less understood in theory, especially compared with value-based RL. In particular, it remains elusive how to design a provably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Qi Cai , Zhuoran Yang , Chi Jin , Zhaoran Wang

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) plays an increasingly important role in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet stable and performant policy optimization remains challenging. Token-level importance ratios often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Chang Gao , Chujie Zheng , Xiong-Hui Chen , Kai Dang , Shixuan Liu , Bowen Yu , An Yang , Shuai Bai , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

Contrastive reinforcement learning (CRL) learns goal-conditioned Q-values through a contrastive objective over state-action and goal representations, removing the need for hand-crafted reward functions. Despite impressive success in…

The proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm stands as one of the most prosperous methods in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). Despite its success, the theoretical understanding of PPO remains deficient. Specifically, it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Han Zhong , Tong Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Ben Rahman

In the field of online reinforcement learning (RL), traditional Gaussian policies and flow-based methods are often constrained by their unimodal expressiveness, complex gradient clipping, or stringent trust-region requirements. Moreover,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Qi Zhang