Related papers: Guaranteed Trust Region Optimization via Two-Phase…
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…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is typically formulated as maximizing entropy subject to matching the distribution of expert trajectories. Classical (dual-ascent) IRL guarantees monotonic performance improvement but requires fully…
Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have seen remarkable progress, but key challenges remain. Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) is known for ensuring monotonic policy improvement through conservative updates within a trust…
Reinforcement learning for large language models faces a fundamental trade-off between sample efficiency and asymptotic performance: strictly on-policy methods discard trajectories after a single update, while off-policy reuse introduces…
Blind Face Restoration (BFR) encounters inherent challenges in exploring its large solution space, leading to common artifacts like missing details and identity ambiguity in the restored images. To tackle these challenges, we propose a…
Large language models are commonly trained through multi-stage post-training: first via RLHF, then fine-tuned for other downstream objectives. Yet even small downstream updates can compromise earlier learned behaviors (e.g., safety),…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) with PPO-like clip objectives has become the standard choice for reward-based fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). Although recent work has explored improved estimators of advantages and normalization,…
From a first-principles perspective, it may seem odd that the strongest results in foundation model fine-tuning (FT) are achieved via a relatively complex, two-stage training procedure. Specifically, one first trains a reward model (RM) on…
Most methods in reinforcement learning use a Policy Gradient (PG) approach to learn a parametric stochastic policy that maps states to actions. The standard approach is to implement such a mapping via a neural network (NN) whose parameters…
Reinforcement learning is structurally harder than supervised learning because the policy changes the data distribution it learns from. The resulting fragility is especially visible in large-model training, where the training and rollout…
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…
Reinforcement learning algorithms are fundamental to align large language models with human preferences and to enhance their reasoning capabilities. However, current reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from training instability…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) offers advanced solutions to constrained optimal control problems. Existing studies in safe RL implicitly assume continuity in policy functions, where policies map states to actions in a smooth,…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising tool to solve robust optimal well control problems where the model parameters are highly uncertain, and the system is partially observable in practice. However, RL of robust control policies often…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is vital for optimizing large language models (LLMs). Recent Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) estimates advantages using multiple on-policy outputs per prompt, leading to high computational costs and low…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) requires coordinated and stable policy updates among interacting agents. Heterogeneous-Agent Trust Region Policy Optimization (HATRPO) enforces per-agent trust region constraints using…
Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) learns a reward function to explain expert demonstrations. Modern IRL methods often use the adversarial (minimax) formulation that alternates between reward and policy optimization, which often lead to…
Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most successful deep reinforcement-learning methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of challenging tasks. However, its optimization behavior is still far from…
Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), as the widely employed policy based reinforcement learning (RL) methods, are prone to converge to a sub-optimal solution as they limit the policy representation…
The success of Deepseek-R1 has drawn the LLM community's attention to reinforcement learning (RL) methods like GRPO. However, such rule-based 0/1 outcome reward methods lack the capability to regulate the intermediate reasoning processes…