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Deep reinforcement learning has been able to solve various tasks successfully, however, due to the construction of policy gradient and training dynamics, tuning deep reinforcement learning models remains challenging. As one of the most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Hanyong Wang , Menglong Yang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is increasingly applied to large-scale decision-making problems like logistics, scheduling, and recommender systems, but existing algorithms struggle with the curse of dimensionality in such large discrete action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Heiko Hoppe , Fabian Akkerman , Wouter van Heeswijk , Maximilian Schiffer

This paper introduces Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO), our stable, efficient, and performant reinforcement learning algorithm for training large language models. Unlike previous algorithms that adopt token-level importance ratios,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Chujie Zheng , Shixuan Liu , Mingze Li , Xiong-Hui Chen , Bowen Yu , Chang Gao , Kai Dang , Yuqiong Liu , Rui Men , An Yang , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have increased the promise of introducing cognitive assistance and automation to robot-assisted laparoscopic surgery (RALS). However, progress in algorithms and methods depends on the…

Policy-gradient methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are typically updated along a single stochastic gradient direction, leaving the rich local structure of the parameter space unexplored. Previous work has shown that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Xinyu Zhang , Aishik Deb , Klaus Mueller

Novel advanced policy gradient (APG) algorithms, such as proximal policy optimization (PPO), trust region policy optimization, and their variations, have become the dominant reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms because of their ease of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-05 Mark Gluzman

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is the canonical framework for large language model alignment. However, rising popularity in offline alignment algorithms challenge the need for on-policy sampling in RLHF. Within the…

This dissertation investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) methods can be designed to be safe, sample-efficient, and robust. Framed through the unifying perspective of contextual-bandit RL, the work addresses two major application…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Shashank Gupta

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is attractive in scenarios where reward engineering can be tedious. However, prior IRL algorithms use on-policy transitions, which require intensive sampling from the current policy for stable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Hana Hoshino , Kei Ota , Asako Kanezaki , Rio Yokota

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms update an agent's parameters according to one of several possible rules, discovered manually through years of research. Automating the discovery of update rules from data could lead to more efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-06 Junhyuk Oh , Matteo Hessel , Wojciech M. Czarnecki , Zhongwen Xu , Hado van Hasselt , Satinder Singh , David Silver

In RL, given a prompt, we sample a group of completions from a model and score them. Two questions follow: which completions should gain probability mass, and how should the parameters move to realize that change? Standard policy-gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Jean Kaddour

We propose expected policy gradients (EPG), which unify stochastic policy gradients (SPG) and deterministic policy gradients (DPG) for reinforcement learning. Inspired by expected sarsa, EPG integrates (or sums) across actions when…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-05-05 Kamil Ciosek , Shimon Whiteson

We introduce Group Policy Gradient (GPG), a family of critic-free policy-gradient estimators for general MDPs. Inspired by the success of GRPO's approach in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), GPG replaces a learned value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Junhua Chen , Zixi Zhang , Hantao Zhong , Rika Antonova

The majority of machine learning methods and algorithms give high priority to prediction performance which may not always correspond to the priority of the users. In many cases, practitioners and researchers in different fields, going from…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to infer sequential decision policies using only offline datasets. This is a particularly difficult setup, especially when learning to achieve multiple different goals or outcomes under a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Mianchu Wang , Yue Jin , Giovanni Montana

Direct optimization is an appealing framework that replaces integration with optimization of a random objective for approximating gradients in models with discrete random variables. A$^\star$ sampling is a framework for optimizing such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Guy Lorberbom , Chris J. Maddison , Nicolas Heess , Tamir Hazan , Daniel Tarlow

Effective visual representation learning is crucial for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to extract task-relevant information from raw sensory inputs and generalize across diverse environments. However, existing RL benchmarks lack the…

Diffusion policy sampling enables reinforcement learning (RL) to represent multimodal action distributions beyond suboptimal unimodal Gaussian policies. However, existing diffusion-based RL methods primarily focus on offline settings for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xiaoyuan Cheng , Wenxuan Yuan , Boyang Li , Yuanchao Xu , Yiming Yang , Hao Liang , Bei Peng , Robert Loftin , Zhuo Sun , Yukun Hu

Reinforcement learning (RL) enables sequential decision-making in complex and high-dimensional environments through interaction with the environment. In most real-world applications, however, a high number of interactions are infeasible. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Md Ferdous Alam , Parinaz Naghizadeh , David Hoelzle

Policy gradient is a widely utilized and foundational algorithm in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). Renowned for its convergence guarantees and stability compared to other RL algorithms, its practical application is often hindered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-12 Yunxiang Li , Rui Yuan , Chen Fan , Mark Schmidt , Samuel Horváth , Robert M. Gower , Martin Takáč