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Related papers: SPO: Sequential Monte Carlo Policy Optimisation

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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

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective for autoregressive language models, but adapting these methods to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) presents fundamental challenges. The core difficulty lies in likelihood…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Jingyang Ou , Jiaqi Han , Minkai Xu , Shaoxuan Xu , Jianwen Xie , Stefano Ermon , Yi Wu , Chongxuan Li

We study test-time scaling, where a model improves its answer through multi-round self-reflection at inference. We introduce In-Context Policy Optimization (ICPO), in which an agent optimizes its response in context using self-assessed or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Tianrun Yu , Yuxiao Yang , Zhaoyang Wang , Kaixiang Zhao , Porter Jenkins , Xuchao Zhang , Chetan Bansal , Huaxiu Yao , Weitong Zhang

In today's uncertain and competitive market, where enterprises are subjected to increasingly shortened product life-cycles and frequent volume changes, reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) applications play a significant role in the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-02 Carlos Alberto Barrera-Diaz , Amir Nourmohammdi , Henrik Smedberg , Tehseen Aslam , Amos H. C. Ng

Nature has long inspired the development of swarm intelligence (SI), a key branch of artificial intelligence that models collective behaviors observed in biological systems for solving complex optimization problems. Particle swarm…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Dikshit Chauhan , Shivani , P. N. Suganthan

The combination of exponentially large action spaces, stochastic dynamics, and long-horizon decision-making under limited resources makes Sequential Stochastic Combinatorial Optimization (SSCO) particularly challenging for reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Vivienne Huiling Wang , Tinghuai Wang , Joni Pajarinen

Hierarchical reinforcement learning is a promising approach to tackle long-horizon decision-making problems with sparse rewards. Unfortunately, most methods still decouple the lower-level skill acquisition process and the training of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-15 Alexander C. Li , Carlos Florensa , Ignasi Clavera , Pieter Abbeel

A Monte Carlo algorithm is said to be adaptive if it automatically calibrates its current proposal distribution using past simulations. The choice of the parametric family that defines the set of proposal distributions is critical for good…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2011-11-11 Christian Schäfer , Nicolas Chopin

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are often categorized as either on-policy or off-policy depending on whether they use data from a target policy of interest or from a different behavior policy. In this paper, we study a subtle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Rujie Zhong , Duohan Zhang , Lukas Schäfer , Stefano V. Albrecht , Josiah P. Hanna

The key to effective alignment lies in high-quality preference data. Recent research has focused on automated alignment, which involves developing alignment systems with minimal human intervention. However, prior research has predominantly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Hao Xiang , Bowen Yu , Hongyu Lin , Keming Lu , Yaojie Lu , Xianpei Han , Ben He , Le Sun , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

This paper introduces a novel causal framework for multi-stage decision-making in natural language action spaces where outcomes are only observed after a sequence of actions. While recent approaches like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Bohan Zhang , Yixin Wang , Paramveer S. Dhillon

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a highly popular model-free reinforcement learning (RL) approach. However, we observe that in a continuous action space, PPO can prematurely shrink the exploration variance, which leads to slow progress…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Perttu Hämäläinen , Amin Babadi , Xiaoxiao Ma , Jaakko Lehtinen

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), an agent acts in an unknown environment to maximize the expected cumulative discounted sum of an external reward signal, i.e., the expected return. In practice, in many tasks of interest, such as policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Riccardo Poiani , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Continual learning aims to learn multiple tasks sequentially while preserving prior knowledge, but faces the challenge of catastrophic forgetting when adapting to new tasks. Recently, approaches leveraging pre-trained models have gained…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Quan Cheng , Yuanyu Wan , Lingyu Wu , Chenping Hou , Lijun Zhang

Research in Curriculum Learning has shown better performance on the task by optimizing the sequence of the training data. Recent works have focused on using complex reinforcement learning techniques to find the optimal data ordering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-10 Dipankar Sarkar , Mukur Gupta

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been pivotal in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but it often suffers from limited exploration and entropy collapse, where models exploit a narrow set of solutions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Shijia Kang , Muhan Zhang

Policy search can in principle acquire complex strategies for control of robots and other autonomous systems. When the policy is trained to process raw sensory inputs, such as images and depth maps, it can also acquire a strategy that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-28 Gregory Kahn , Tianhao Zhang , Sergey Levine , Pieter Abbeel

Reinforcement Learning, particularly through policy gradient methods, has played a central role in enabling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, the optimization stability of policy gradients in this setting remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Luckeciano C. Melo , Alessandro Abate , Yarin Gal

We propose Multi Agent Reflective Policy Optimization (MARPO) to alleviate the issue of sample inefficiency in multi agent reinforcement learning. MARPO consists of two key components: a reflection mechanism that leverages subsequent…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Cuiling Wu , Yaozhong Gan , Junliang Xing , Ying Fu