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What are the limits of controlling language models via synthetic training data? We develop a reinforcement learning (RL) primitive, the Dataset Policy Gradient (DPG), which can precisely optimize synthetic data generators to produce a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Tristan Thrush , Sung Min Park , Herman Brunborg , Luke Bailey , Marcel Roed , Neil Band , Christopher Potts , Tatsunori Hashimoto

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are typically applied directly in environments to learn policies. In some complex environments with continuous state-action spaces, sparse rewards, and/or long temporal horizons, learning a good policy in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-03 Deyao Zhu , Li Erran Li , Mohamed Elhoseiny

We consider a setting involving $N$ agents, where each agent interacts with an environment modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). The agents' MDPs differ in their reward functions, capturing heterogeneous objectives/tasks. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Feng Zhu , Robert W. Heath , Aritra Mitra

We propose a general and model-free approach for Reinforcement Learning (RL) on real robotics with sparse rewards. We build upon the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm to use demonstrations. Both demonstrations and actual…

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training paradigm for large language models (LLMs), but its performance is highly sensitive to the quality of training problems. This sensitivity stems from the non-stationarity of RL:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Ningyuan Yang , Weihua Du , Weiwei Sun , Sean Welleck , Yiming Yang

The theory of continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) has progressed rapidly in recent years. While the ultimate objective of RL is typically to learn deterministic control policies, most existing continuous-time RL methods rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Ziheng Cheng , Xin Guo , Yufei Zhang

Policy gradient (PG) gives rise to a rich class of reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Recently, there has been an emerging trend to accelerate the existing PG methods such as REINFORCE by the \emph{variance reduction} techniques. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-31 Junyu Zhang , Chengzhuo Ni , Zheng Yu , Csaba Szepesvari , Mengdi Wang

Multi-task representation learning (MTRL) is an approach that learns shared latent representations across related tasks, facilitating collaborative learning that improves the overall learning efficiency. This paper studies MTRL for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yaoze Guo , Shana Moothedath

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

In this paper, we study the problem of robust cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) where a large number of cooperative agents with distributed information aim to learn policies in the presence of \emph{stochastic} and…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Muhammad Aneeq uz Zaman , Mathieu Laurière , Alec Koppel , Tamer Başar

State-of-the-art model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches either use gradient-free, population-based methods for planning, learned policy networks, or a combination of policy networks and planning. Hybrid approaches that combine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Jonathan Spieler , Sven Behnke

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) techniques have received significant attention in control and decision-making algorithms. Most applications involve complex decision-making systems, justified by the algorithms' computational power and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-28 Fatemeh Tavakkoli , Pouria Sarhadi , Benoit Clement , Wasif Naeem

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is a promising outer-loop intelligence paradigm which can deploy problem solving strategies for complex tasks. Consequently, DRL has been utilized for several scientific applications, specifically in cases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-05 Sahil Bhola , Suraj Pawar , Prasanna Balaprakash , Romit Maulik

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

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods for large-scale reinforcement learning, and their empirical success has prompted several works that develop the foundation of their global convergence theory. However, prior works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Junzi Zhang , Jongho Kim , Brendan O'Donoghue , Stephen Boyd

This paper deals with distributed policy optimization in reinforcement learning, which involves a central controller and a group of learners. In particular, two typical settings encountered in several applications are considered:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Tianyi Chen , Kaiqing Zhang , Georgios B. Giannakis , Tamer Başar

Safe Reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims at learning optimal policies while staying safe. A popular solution to Safe RL is shielding, which uses a logical safety specification to prevent an RL agent from taking unsafe actions. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Wen-Chi Yang , Giuseppe Marra , Gavin Rens , Luc De Raedt

Designing suitable reward functions for numerous interacting intelligent agents is challenging in real-world applications. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) in mean field games (MFGs) offers a practical framework to infer reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Yang Chen , Xiao Lin , Bo Yan , Libo Zhang , Jiamou Liu , Neset Özkan Tan , Michael Witbrock

This paper proposes a novel formulation for reinforcement learning (RL) with large language models, explaining why and under what conditions the true sequence-level reward can be optimized via a surrogate token-level objective in policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Chujie Zheng , Kai Dang , Bowen Yu , Mingze Li , Huiqiang Jiang , Junrong Lin , Yuqiong Liu , Hao Lin , Chencan Wu , Feng Hu , An Yang , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin