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Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for learning optimal policies in environments where direct exploration is expensive or unfeasible. However, the adoption of such policies in practice is often challenging, as they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Aaron Sonabend-W , Junwei Lu , Leo A. Celi , Tianxi Cai , Peter Szolovits

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn an optimal policy using a previously collected static dataset, is an important paradigm of RL. Standard RL methods often perform poorly in this regime due to the function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-29 Zhendong Wang , Jonathan J Hunt , Mingyuan Zhou

Medical treatments often involve a sequence of decisions, each informed by previous outcomes. This process closely aligns with reinforcement learning (RL), a framework for optimizing sequential decisions to maximize cumulative rewards under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Ali Shirali , Alexander Schubert , Ahmed Alaa

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) tries to learn the near-optimal policy with recorded offline experience without online exploration. Current offline RL research includes: 1) generative modeling, i.e., approximating a policy using fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Hua Wei , Deheng Ye , Zhao Liu , Hao Wu , Bo Yuan , Qiang Fu , Wei Yang , Zhenhui Li

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), regularization has emerged as a popular tool both in theory and practice, typically based either on an entropy bonus or a Kullback-Leibler divergence that constrains successive policies. In practice, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Alena Shilova , Alex Davey , Brahim Driss , Riad Akrour

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have increasingly relied on reinforcement learning (RL) to improve their reasoning capabilities. Three types of approaches have been widely adopted: The first relies on a deep neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Shijin Gong , Kai Ye , Jin Zhu , Xinyu Zhang , Hongyi Zhou , Chengchun Shi

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) is to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on model-free robust RL, where the uncertainty set is defined to be centering at a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to model optimal exercise strategies for option-type products. We pursue the RL avenue in order to learn the optimal action-value function of the underlying stopping problem. In addition to…

Pricing of Securities · Quantitative Finance 2024-06-27 John Ery , Loris Michel

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn optimal policies from offline datasets, where the parameterization of policies is crucial but often overlooked. Recently, Diffsuion-QL significantly boosts the performance of offline RL by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Bingyi Kang , Xiao Ma , Chao Du , Tianyu Pang , Shuicheng Yan

Reinforcement learning (RL) has seen significant research and application results but often requires large amounts of training data. This paper proposes two data-efficient off-policy RL methods that use parametrized Q-learning. In these…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-09 J. S. van Hulst , W. P. M. H. Heemels , D. J. Antunes

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the de facto standard practice for sequential decision-making problems by improving future acting policies with feedback. However, RL algorithms may require extensive trial-and-error interactions to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Shenao Zhang , Sirui Zheng , Shuqi Ke , Zhihan Liu , Wanxin Jin , Jianbo Yuan , Yingxiang Yang , Hongxia Yang , Zhaoran Wang

Classical reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize the expected cumulative rewards. In this work, we consider the RL setting where the goal is to optimize the quantile of the cumulative rewards. We parameterize the policy controlling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Jinyang Jiang , Jiaqiao Hu , Yijie Peng

Recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms making use of Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization as a core component have shown outstanding performance. Yet, only little is understood theoretically about why KL regularization helps, so far.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Nino Vieillard , Tadashi Kozuno , Bruno Scherrer , Olivier Pietquin , Rémi Munos , Matthieu Geist

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to improve complex reasoning abilities. However, state-of-the-art policy optimization methods often suffer from high computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Kianté Brantley , Mingyu Chen , Zhaolin Gao , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun , Wenhao Zhan , Xuezhou Zhang

Classical reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize the expected cumulative reward. In this work, we consider the RL setting where the goal is to optimize the quantile of the cumulative reward. We parameterize the policy controlling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-15 Jinyang Jiang , Jiaqiao Hu , Yijie Peng

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), encounter the challenge of distribution shift. Current approaches typically address this issue…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Qiyuan Deng , Xuefeng Bai , Kehai Chen , Yaowei Wang , Liqiang Nie , Min Zhang

Policy evaluation or value function or Q-function approximation is a key procedure in reinforcement learning (RL). It is a necessary component of policy iteration and can be used for variance reduction in policy gradient methods. Therefore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-10-17 Xinyan Yan , Krzysztof Choromanski , Byron Boots , Vikas Sindhwani

Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently use on-policy algorithms, such as PPO or GRPO. However, policy lag from distributed training architectures and differences between the training and inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Daniel Ritter , Owen Oertell , Bradley Guo , Jonathan Chang , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for inducing explicit reasoning behaviors in large language and vision-language models. However, reasoning-oriented RL post-training remains fundamentally challenging due to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Fan Yang , Rui Meng , Trudi Di Qi , Ali Ezzati , Yuxin Wen

We study behavior-regularized reinforcement learning (RL), where regularization toward a reference distribution (the dataset in offline RL or the base model in LLM RL finetuning) is essential to prevent value over-optimization caused by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Haoran Xu , Kaiwen Hu , Somayeh Sojoudi , Amy Zhang