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Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is widely used in continuous control due to its robustness and stable training, yet it remains sample-inefficient in tasks with expensive interactions and high-dimensional action spaces. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Tianci Gao , Konstantin A. Neusypin , Dmitry D. Dmitriev , Bo Yang , Shengren Rao

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

Safe reinforcement learning (safe RL) aims to respect safety requirements while optimizing long-term performance. In many practical applications, however, the problem involves an infinite number of constraints, known as semi-infinite safe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Jiaming Zhang , Yujie Yang , Haoning Wang , Liping Zhang , Shengbo Eben Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to learn treatment policies and aid decision making in healthcare. However, given the need for generalization over complex state/action spaces, the incorporation of function approximators (e.g., deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-26 Shengpu Tang , Jenna Wiens

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are among the most successful policy gradient approaches in deep reinforcement learning (RL). While these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ahmed Touati , Amy Zhang , Joelle Pineau , Pascal Vincent

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are often categorized as either on-policy or off-policy depending on whether they use data from a target policy of interest or from a different behavior policy. In this paper, we study a subtle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Rujie Zhong , Duohan Zhang , Lukas Schäfer , Stefano V. Albrecht , Josiah P. Hanna

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is commonly used in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback to align large language models (LLMs) with downstream tasks. This paper investigates the feasibility of using PPO for direct reinforcement…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Alexander G. Padula , Dennis J. N. J. Soemers

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has gained increasing attention in control engineering. Especially, policy gradient methods are widely used. In this work, we improve the tracking performance of proximal policy optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-21 Jana Mayer , Johannes Westermann , Juan Pedro Gutiérrez H. Muriedas , Uwe Mettin , Alexander Lampe

Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Alexander W. Goodall , Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli

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

Model-based algorithms, which learn a dynamics model from logged experience and perform some sort of pessimistic planning under the learned model, have emerged as a promising paradigm for offline reinforcement learning (offline RL).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-28 Tianhe Yu , Aviral Kumar , Rafael Rafailov , Aravind Rajeswaran , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a variant of RL where the policy is learned from a previously collected dataset of trajectories and rewards. In our work, we propose a practical approach to offline RL with large language models…

Offline reinforcement learning methods hold the promise of learning policies from pre-collected datasets without the need to query the environment for new transitions. This setting is particularly well-suited for continuous control robotic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-18 Xi Chen , Ali Ghadirzadeh , Tianhe Yu , Yuan Gao , Jianhao Wang , Wenzhe Li , Bin Liang , Chelsea Finn , Chongjie Zhang

The recent success of supervised learning methods on ever larger offline datasets has spurred interest in the reinforcement learning (RL) field to investigate whether the same paradigms can be translated to RL algorithms. This research…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Mengjiao Yang , Ofir Nachum

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Penghui Qi , Xiangxin Zhou , Zichen Liu , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Min Lin , Wee Sun Lee

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim to learn optimal policies with access only to trajectories in a fixed dataset. Policy constraint methods formulate policy learning as an optimization problem that balances maximizing reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Padmanaba Srinivasan , William Knottenbelt

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel in robotic manipulation but are constrained by their heavy reliance on expert demonstrations, leading to demonstration bias and limiting performance. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a vital…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Senyu Fei , Siyin Wang , Li Ji , Ao Li , Shiduo Zhang , Liming Liu , Jinlong Hou , Jingjing Gong , Xianzhong Zhao , Xipeng Qiu

Policy learning (PL) is a module of a task-oriented dialogue system that trains an agent to make actions in each dialogue turn. Imitating human action is a fundamental problem of PL. However, both supervised learning (SL) and reinforcement…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Zhoujian Sun , Chenyang Zhao , Zhengxing Huang , Nai Ding

Policy optimization for large language models often suffers from sparse reward signals in multi-step reasoning tasks. Critic-free methods like GRPO assign a single normalized outcome reward to all tokens, providing limited guidance for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Ruiyi Ding , Yongxuan Lv , Xianhui Meng , Jiahe Song , Chao Wang , Chen Jiang , Yuan Cheng

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) learns optimal policies from fixed datasets, training a policy once and deploying it at inference time without further refinement. Inspired by model predictive control (MPC), we introduce an inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Rohan Deb , Stephen J. Wright , Arindam Banerjee