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Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a practical route to improve large language model reasoning, and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a widely used optimizer in this setting. However, RLVR training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Tue Le , Linh Ngo Van , Trung Le

Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms are among the best candidates for the much-anticipated applications of reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, such as robotics. However, the trial-and-error nature of these methods poses safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Matteo Papini , Matteo Pirotta , Marcello Restelli

Gradient-based methods have been widely used for system design and optimization in diverse application domains. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in studying theoretical properties of these methods in the context of control and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-11 Bin Hu , Kaiqing Zhang , Na Li , Mehran Mesbahi , Maryam Fazel , Tamer Başar

Action-constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is a widely-used approach in various real-world applications, such as scheduling in networked systems with resource constraints and control of a robot with kinematic constraints. While the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Jyun-Li Lin , Wei Hung , Shang-Hsuan Yang , Ping-Chun Hsieh , Xi Liu

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

Reward maximization, safe exploration, and intrinsic motivation are often studied as separate objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). We present a unified geometric framework, that views these goals as instances of a single optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Nikola Milosevic , Nico Scherf

A key challenge in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) lies in the intractability of their likelihood functions, which are essential for the RL objective, necessitating corresponding approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Nianyi Lin , Jiajie Zhang , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Atish Dixit , Ahmed H. ElSheikh

Safe exploration is a key to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in safety-critical systems. Existing safe exploration methods guaranteed safety under the assumption of regularity, and it has been difficult to apply them to large-scale…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Akifumi Wachi , Yunyue Wei , Yanan Sui

A novel Policy Gradient (PG) algorithm, called $\textit{Matryoshka Policy Gradient}$ (MPG), is introduced and studied, in the context of fixed-horizon max-entropy reinforcement learning, where an agent aims at maximizing entropy bonuses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 François Ged , Maria Han Veiga

We consider resource allocation problems in multi-user wireless networks, where the goal is to optimize a network-wide utility function subject to constraints on the ergodic average performance of users. We demonstrate how a state-augmented…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-24 Yigit Berkay Uslu , Navid NaderiAlizadeh , Mark Eisen , Alejandro Ribeiro

This paper considers the problem of solving constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems with anytime guarantees, meaning that the algorithmic solution must yield a constraint-satisfying policy at every iteration of its evolution. Our…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-03 Pol Mestres , Arnau Marzabal , Jorge Cortés

We explore reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal policy in the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem. In particular, we consider the convergence of policy gradient methods in the setting of known and unknown parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Ben Hambly , Renyuan Xu , Huining Yang

Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Shihab Ahmed , El Houcine Bergou , Aritra Dutta , Yue Wang

The building sector consumes the largest energy in the world, and there have been considerable research interests in energy consumption and comfort management of buildings. Inspired by recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Donghwan Lee , Niao He , Seungjae Lee , Panagiota Karava , Jianghai Hu

For continuing environments, reinforcement learning (RL) methods commonly maximize the discounted reward criterion with discount factor close to 1 in order to approximate the average reward (the gain). However, such a criterion only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Vektor Dewanto , Marcus Gallagher

In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), interactions with the environment are limited due to cost or feasibility. This presents a challenge to traditional RL algorithms since the max-return objective involves an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-05 Ofir Nachum , Bo Dai , Ilya Kostrikov , Yinlam Chow , Lihong Li , Dale Schuurmans

While policy optimization algorithms have played an important role in recent empirical success of Reinforcement Learning (RL), the existing theoretical understanding of policy optimization remains rather limited -- they are either…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Qinghua Liu , Gellért Weisz , András György , Chi Jin , Csaba Szepesvári

Reinforcement Learning (RL) in partially observable environments poses significant challenges due to the complexity of learning under uncertainty. While additional information, such as that available in simulations, can enhance training,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yueheng Li , Guangming Xie , Zongqing Lu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou