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This paper deals with distributed policy optimization in reinforcement learning, which involves a central controller and a group of learners. In particular, two typical settings encountered in several applications are considered:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Tianyi Chen , Kaiqing Zhang , Georgios B. Giannakis , Tamer Başar

Policy optimization methods are popular reinforcement learning algorithms, because their incremental and on-policy nature makes them more stable than the value-based counterparts. However, the same properties also make them slow to converge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Andrea Zanette , Ching-An Cheng , Alekh Agarwal

The policy gradient approach is a flexible and powerful reinforcement learning method particularly for problems with continuous actions such as robot control. A common challenge in this scenario is how to reduce the variance of policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-18 Tingting Zhao , Hirotaka Hachiya , Voot Tangkaratt , Jun Morimoto , Masashi Sugiyama

Policy gradient is a generic and flexible reinforcement learning approach that generally enjoys simplicity in analysis, implementation, and deployment. In the last few decades, this approach has been extensively advanced for fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Yisong Yue , Animashree Anandkumar

Recently, foundation models such as OpenAI's O1 and O3, along with DeepSeek's R1, have demonstrated strong reasoning capacities and problem-solving skills acquired through large-scale reinforcement learning (RL), with wide applications in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Tianbing Xu

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

Reinforcement learning is a framework for learning to act sequentially in an unknown environment. We propose a natural approach for modeling policy structure in policy gradients. The key idea is to optimize for a subset of future rewards:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Puneet Mathur , Branislav Kveton , Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Viet Dac Lai

The goal of policy gradient approaches is to find a policy in a given class of policies which maximizes the expected return. Given a differentiable model of the policy, we want to apply a gradient-ascent technique to reach a local optimum.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Mattis Manfred Kämmerer

To facilitate efficient learning, policy gradient approaches to deep reinforcement learning (RL) are typically paired with variance reduction measures and strategies for making large but safe policy changes based on a batch of experiences.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-13 Jared Markowitz , Edward W. Staley

We introduce a novel reinforcement learning algorithm (AGRO, for Any-Generation Reward Optimization) for fine-tuning large-language models. AGRO leverages the concept of generation consistency, which states that the optimal policy satisfies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Yunhao Tang , Taco Cohen , David W. Zhang , Michal Valko , Rémi Munos

Policy gradient methods are widely adopted reinforcement learning algorithms for tasks with continuous action spaces. These methods succeeded in many application domains, however, because of their notorious sample inefficiency their use…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-20 Davide Mambelli , Stephan Bongers , Onno Zoeter , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Frans A. Oliehoek

We propose two policy gradient algorithms for solving the problem of control in an off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) context. Both algorithms incorporate a smoothed functional (SF) based gradient estimation scheme. The first algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Nithia Vijayan , Prashanth L. A

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved strong results, but deploying visual policies on resource-constrained edge devices remains challenging due to computational cost and communication latency. Many deployments therefore offload policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Carlos Purves

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Yaru Hao , Li Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Zewen Chi , Furu Wei

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected return using a given static dataset of transitions. However, offline RL faces the distribution shift problem. The policy constraint offline RL method is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Yuanhao Chen , Qi Liu , Pengbin Chen , Zhongjian Qiao , Yanjie Li

Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) is an optimization method originally designed for tackling machine learning problems with a finite sum structure. SVRG was later shown to work for policy evaluation, a problem in reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Zilun Peng , Ahmed Touati , Pascal Vincent , Doina Precup

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved great empirical successes in various domains. However, the large search space of neural networks requires a large amount of data, which makes the current RL algorithms not sample efficient.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Qianli Shen , Yan Li , Haoming Jiang , Zhaoran Wang , Tuo Zhao

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

Deep reinforcement learning can generate complex control policies, but requires large amounts of training data to work effectively. Recent work has attempted to address this issue by leveraging differentiable simulators. However, inherent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-15 Jie Xu , Viktor Makoviychuk , Yashraj Narang , Fabio Ramos , Wojciech Matusik , Animesh Garg , Miles Macklin

We introduce AMAGO, an in-context Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent that uses sequence models to tackle the challenges of generalization, long-term memory, and meta-learning. Recent works have shown that off-policy learning can make…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Jake Grigsby , Linxi Fan , Yuke Zhu