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Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students. Most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Zhaoyang Zhang , Shuli Jiang , Yantao Shen , Yuting Zhang , Dhananjay Ram , Shuo Yang , Zhuowen Tu , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods can generally be categorized into two types: RL-based and Imitation-based. RL-based methods could in principle enjoy out-of-distribution generalization but suffer from erroneous off-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-06 Haoran Xu , Li Jiang , Jianxiong Li , Xianyuan Zhan

Reinforcement learning (RL) has increasingly become a pivotal technique in the post-training of large language models (LLMs). The effective exploration of the output space is essential for the success of RL. We observe that for complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Shihan Dou , Muling Wu , Jingwen Xu , Rui Zheng , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models is an energy-intensive endeavor: training can be unstable, and the policy may gradually drift away from its pretrained weights. We present \emph{RLEP}\, -- \,Reinforcement Learning with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Hongzhi Zhang , Jia Fu , Jingyuan Zhang , Kai Fu , Qi Wang , Fuzheng Zhang , Guorui Zhou

Offline policy learning is aimed at learning decision-making policies using existing datasets of trajectories without collecting additional data. The primary motivation for using reinforcement learning (RL) instead of supervised learning…

To overcome the curse of dimensionality and curse of modeling in Dynamic Programming (DP) methods for solving classical Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are popular. In this paper, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-29 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

Distribution network reconfiguration (DNR) has proved to be an economical and effective way to improve the reliability of distribution systems. As optimal network configuration depends on system operating states (e.g., loads at each node),…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-05-03 Mukesh Gautam , Narayan Bhusal , Mohammed Benidris

We propose FlowRL: matching the full reward distribution via flow balancing instead of maximizing rewards in large language model (LLM) reinforcement learning (RL). Recent advanced reasoning models adopt reward-maximizing methods (\eg, PPO…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy from a static dataset without further interactions with the environment. Collecting sufficiently large datasets for offline RL is exhausting since this data collection requires…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Jongchan Park , Mingyu Park , Donghwan Lee

Effective exploration remains a central challenge in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL), particularly in high-dimensional continuous control tasks where sample efficiency is crucial. A prominent line of recent work leverages learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Álvaro Serra-Gomez , Daniel Jarne Ornia , Dhruva Tirumala , Thomas Moerland

Although distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has been widely examined in the past few years, very few studies investigate the validity of the obtained Q-function estimator in the distributional setting. To fully understand how the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Qi Kuang , Zhoufan Zhu , Liwen Zhang , Fan Zhou

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a key approach for enhancing LLM reasoning. However, standard frameworks like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) typically employ a uniform rollout budget, leading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Zhiyuan Yao , Yi-Kai Zhang , Yuxin Chen , Yueqing Sun , Zishan Xu , Yu Yang , Tianhao Hu , Qi Gu , Hui Su , Xunliang Cai

We present an algorithm for local, regularized, policy improvement in reinforcement learning (RL) that allows us to formulate model-based and model-free variants in a single framework. Our algorithm can be interpreted as a natural extension…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental framework for sequential decision-making, in which an agent learns an optimal policy through interactions with an unknown environment. In settings with function approximation, many existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ruiquan Huang , Donghao Li , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from fixed datasets without further environment interaction, making it particularly valuable in high-risk or costly domains. Extreme $Q$-Learning (XQL) is a recent offline RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Xinming Gao , Shangzhe Li , Yujin Cai , Wenwu Yu

Reinforcement learning with verifiable reward has recently emerged as a central paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs); however, prevailing mean-based methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Tao Ren , Jinyang Jiang , Hui Yang , Wan Tian , Minhao Zou , Guanghao Li , Zishi Zhang , Qinghao Wang , Shentao Qin , Yanjun Zhao , Rui Tao , Hui Shao , Yijie Peng

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) has proven to be a data efficient approach for learning control tasks but is difficult to utilize in domains with complex observations such as images. In this paper, we present a method for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Marvin Zhang , Sharad Vikram , Laura Smith , Pieter Abbeel , Matthew J. Johnson , Sergey Levine

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) faces distributional shift and unreliable value estimation, especially for out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. To address this, existing uncertainty-based methods penalize the value function with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Xudong Yu , Chenjia Bai , Hongyi Guo , Changhong Wang , Zhen Wang

Reinforcement Learning algorithms are primarily focused on learning a policy that maximizes expected return. As a result, the learned policy can exploit one or few reward sources. However, in many natural situations, it is desirable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Sagalpreet Singh , Rishi Saket , Aravindan Raghuveer