English
Related papers

Related papers: Residual Policy Gradient: A Reward View of KL-regu…

200 papers

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) leverages a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence loss to stabilize training and prevent overfitting. However, in methods such as GRPO, its implementation may be guided by principles from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Kezhao Liu , Jason Klein Liu , Mingtao Chen , Yiming Liu

Multi-turn tool calling is challenging for Large Language Models (LLMs) because rewards are sparse and exploration is expensive. A common recipe, SFT followed by GRPO, can stall when within-group reward variation is low (e.g., more rollouts…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Haitian Zhong , Jixiu Zhai , Lei Song , Jiang Bian , Qiang Liu , Tieniu Tan

We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Nithia Vijayan , Prashanth L. A

Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems often have access to sparse rewards where the agent receives a reward signal only when it has achieved the goal, making policy optimization a difficult problem. Several works augment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Siddhant Agarwal , Ishan Durugkar , Peter Stone , Amy Zhang

Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a single policy that effectively solves multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a constrained formulation for multi-task RL where the goal is to maximize the average…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

We tackle the problem of aligning pre-trained large language models (LMs) with human preferences. If we view text generation as a sequential decision-making problem, reinforcement learning (RL) appears to be a natural conceptual framework.…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework to optimize a control policy using rewards that are revealed by the system as a response to a control action. In its standard form, RL involves a single agent that uses its policy to accomplish a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-11-24 Juan Cervino , Juan Andres Bazerque , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro

Modern meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) methods are mainly developed based on model-agnostic meta-learning, which performs policy gradient steps across tasks to maximize policy performance. However, the gradient conflict problem is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-22 Haozhi Wang , Qing Wang , Yunfeng Shao , Dong Li , Jianye Hao , Yinchuan Li

Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan , Pieter Abbeel

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is useful in many problems that require the cooperation and coordination of multiple agents. Learning optimal policies using reinforcement learning in a multi-agent setting can be very difficult as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Rafael Pina , Varuna De Silva , Joosep Hook , Ahmet Kondoz

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has recently enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly for mathematical problem solving. However, a fundamental limitation remains: as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Wenhao Deng , Long Wei , Chenglei Yu , Tailin Wu

In this paper, we focus on the problem of robustifying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with respect to model uncertainties. Indeed, in the framework of model-based RL, we propose to merge the theory of constrained Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Reazul Hasan Russel , Mouhacine Benosman , Jeroen Van Baar

Policy gradient is an efficient technique for improving a policy in a reinforcement learning setting. However, vanilla online variants are on-policy only and not able to take advantage of off-policy data. In this paper we describe a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-10 Brendan O'Donoghue , Remi Munos , Koray Kavukcuoglu , Volodymyr Mnih

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

For all its successes, Reinforcement Learning (RL) still struggles to deliver formal guarantees on the closed-loop behavior of the learned policy. Among other things, guaranteeing the safety of RL with respect to safety-critical systems is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-04-03 Sebastien Gros , Mario Zanon , Alberto Bemporad

Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO) is an established and effective policy gradient algorithm used for Language Model Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (LM-RLHF). PPO performs well empirically but has a heuristic motivation and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Jason R Brown , Lennie Wells , Edward James Young , Sergio Bacallado

Designing optimal reward functions has been desired but extremely difficult in reinforcement learning (RL). When it comes to modern complex tasks, sophisticated reward functions are widely used to simplify policy learning yet even a tiny…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Ning Wei , Jiahua Liang , Di Xie , Shiliang Pu

Personalized decision systems in healthcare and behavioral support often rely on static rule-based or engagement-maximizing heuristics that overlook users' emotional context and ethical constraints. Such approaches risk recommending…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Garapati Keerthana , Manik Gupta

We study a class of constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which multiple constraint specifications are not identified before training. It is challenging to identify appropriate constraint specifications due to the undefined…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-02 Dongsheng Ding , Zhengyan Huan , Alejandro Ribeiro

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown exceptional performance across various applications, enabling autonomous agents to learn optimal policies through interaction with their environments. However, traditional RL frameworks often face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Rui Liu , Anish Gupta , Erfaun Noorani , Pratap Tokekar