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Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely used for critic-free Large Language Model (LLM) post-training, but its KL regularization is usually implemented as a local loss-side token penalty. We show that this misses the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jiarui Yao , Ruida Wang , Hao Bai , Tong Zhang

Standard reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) trains a reward model on pairwise preference data and then uses it for policy optimization. However, while reward models are optimized to capture relative preferences, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Kyuseong Choi , Dwaipayan Saha , Woojeong Kim , Anish Agarwal , Raaz Dwivedi

It is known that reinforcement learning (RL) is data-hungry. To improve sample-efficiency of RL, it has been proposed that the learning algorithm utilize data from 'approximately similar' processes. However, since the process models are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Vinay Kanakeri , Shivam Bajaj , Ashwin Verma , Vijay Gupta , Aritra Mitra

Reinforcement learning (RL) faces challenges in evaluating policy trajectories within intricate game tasks due to the difficulty in designing comprehensive and precise reward functions. This inherent difficulty curtails the broader…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Zichao Shen , Tianchen Zhu , Qingyun Sun , Shiqi Gao , Jianxin Li

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), the goal of agents is to discover an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative rewards. This objective may also be viewed as finding a policy that optimizes a linear function of its state-action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Navdeep Kumar , Kaixin Wang , Kfir Levy , Shie Mannor

Reward shaping in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for complex tasks remains a significant challenge. Existing approaches often fail to find optimal solutions or cannot efficiently handle such tasks. We propose HYPRL, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Tzu-Han Hsu , Arshia Rafieioskouei , Borzoo Bonakdarpour

Personalization in machine learning (ML) tailors models' decisions to the individual characteristics of users. While this approach has seen success in areas like recommender systems, its expansion into high-stakes fields such as healthcare…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Dmitry Ivanov , Omer Ben-Porat

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved significant breakthroughs in various tasks. However, most DRL algorithms suffer a problem of generalizing the learned policy which makes the learning performance largely affected even by minor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-11 Zhengyao Jiang , Shan Luo

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems are fundamental in online decision-making and have been instrumental in finding an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Function approximations are usually deployed to handle large or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jiashuo Jiang , Yiming Zong , Yinyu Ye

We consider the maximum causal entropy inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem for infinite-horizon stationary mean-field games (MFG), in which we model the unknown reward function within a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Berkay Anahtarci , Can Deha Kariksiz , Naci Saldi

Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Shihab Ahmed , El Houcine Bergou , Aritra Dutta , Yue Wang

Inferring reward functions from demonstrations is a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in multi-agent RL (MARL), where large joint state-action spaces and complex inter-agent interactions complicate the task. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 The Viet Bui , Tien Mai , Hong Thanh Nguyen

Decision-making under distribution shift is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment environments differ. We study this problem through the lens of robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Jingwen Gu , Yiting He , Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been extensively employed in a wide range of decision-making problems, such as games and robotics. Recently, diffusion policies have shown strong potential in modeling multi-modal behaviors, enabling more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Ben Liu , Shunpeng Yang , Hua Chen

The $Q$-function is a central quantity in many Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for which RL agents behave following a (soft)-greedy policy w.r.t. to $Q$. It is a powerful tool that allows action selection without a model of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Nino Vieillard , Marcin Andrychowicz , Anton Raichuk , Olivier Pietquin , Matthieu Geist

Aligning large language models with pointwise absolute rewards has so far required online, on-policy algorithms such as PPO and GRPO. In contrast, simpler methods that can leverage offline or off-policy data, such as DPO and REBEL, are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Simon Matrenok , Skander Moalla , Caglar Gulcehre

Although well-established in general reinforcement learning (RL), value-based methods are rarely explored in constrained RL (CRL) for their incapability of finding policies that can randomize among multiple actions. To apply value-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Tianchi Cai , Wenpeng Zhang , Lihong Gu , Xiaodong Zeng , Jinjie Gu

The aim of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is to create systems capable of making autonomous decisions by learning from their environment through trial and error. This paper emphasizes the importance of reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Sinan Ibrahim , Mostafa Mostafa , Ali Jnadi , Hadi Salloum , Pavel Osinenko

Offline inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover a reward function that explains expert behavior using only fixed demonstration data, without any additional online interaction. We propose BiCQL-ML, a policy-free offline IRL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Junsung Park

Post-deployment machine learning algorithms often influence the environments they act in, and thus shift the underlying dynamics that the standard reinforcement learning (RL) methods ignore. While designing optimal algorithms in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Debabrota Basu , Udvas Das , Brahim Driss , Uddalak Mukherjee