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Related papers: Simple Policy Optimization

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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

Safe reinforcement learning aims to learn the optimal policy while satisfying safety constraints, which is essential in real-world applications. However, current algorithms still struggle for efficient policy updates with hard constraint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Linrui Zhang , Li Shen , Long Yang , Shixiang Chen , Bo Yuan , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

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

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

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

Single-trajectory reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim to optimize policies from datasets consisting of (prompt, response, reward) triplets, where scalar rewards are directly available. This supervision format is highly practical, as it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Bilal Faye , Hanane Azzag , Mustapha Lebbah

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

Recent successful deep reinforcement learning algorithms, such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) or Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), are fundamentally variations of conservative policy iteration (CPI). These algorithms iterate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-27 Erinc Merdivan , Sten Hanke , Matthieu Geist

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Hung Le , Thommen Karimpanal George , Majid Abdolshah , Dung Nguyen , Kien Do , Sunil Gupta , Svetha Venkatesh

The goal of robust constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is to optimize an agent's performance under the worst-case model uncertainty while satisfying safety or resource constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate that strong duality does…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Shaocong Ma , Ziyi Chen , Yi Zhou , Heng Huang

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-15 Xiangxiang Chu

Instability and slowness are two main problems in deep reinforcement learning. Even if proximal policy optimization (PPO) is the state of the art, it still suffers from these two problems. We introduce an improved algorithm based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-01 Zhenyu Zhang , Xiangfeng Luo , Tong Liu , Shaorong Xie , Jianshu Wang , Wei Wang , Yang Li , Yan Peng

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

In safe reinforcement learning (SRL) problems, an agent explores the environment to maximize an expected total reward and meanwhile avoids violation of certain constraints on a number of expected total costs. In general, such SRL problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Tengyu Xu , Yingbin Liang , Guanghui Lan

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is widely used in reinforcement learning due to its strong empirical performance, yet it lacks formal guarantees for policy improvement and convergence. PPO's clipped surrogate objective is motivated by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Razvan-Andrei Lascu , David Šiška , Łukasz Szpruch

We propose a new sample-efficient methodology, called Supervised Policy Update (SPU), for deep reinforcement learning. Starting with data generated by the current policy, SPU formulates and solves a constrained optimization problem in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Quan Vuong , Yiming Zhang , Keith W. Ross

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) methods learn a policy by iteratively performing multiple mini-batch optimization epochs of a surrogate objective with one set of sampled data. Ratio clipping PPO is a popular variant that clips the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-02 Mingfei Sun , Vitaly Kurin , Guoqing Liu , Sam Devlin , Tao Qin , Katja Hofmann , Shimon Whiteson

Trust region methods, such as TRPO, are often used to stabilize policy optimization algorithms in reinforcement learning (RL). While current trust region strategies are effective for continuous control, they typically require a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-26 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Kelvin Xu , Dale Schuurmans

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Yu Luo , Shuo Han , Yihan Hu , Dong Li , Jianye Hao