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Related papers: Evolutionary Policy Optimization

200 papers

We present Reward-Switching Policy Optimization (RSPO), a paradigm to discover diverse strategies in complex RL environments by iteratively finding novel policies that are both locally optimal and sufficiently different from existing ones.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-04 Zihan Zhou , Wei Fu , Bingliang Zhang , Yi Wu

We study efficiency as a first-class objective in Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) and present ECO, an efficient learning framework that combines batched preference optimization with a Mamba backbone. Instead of tightly interleaving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Zhenxing Xu , Zeyuan Ma , Weidong Bao , Yan Zheng , Ji Wang , Zhiguang Cao

While policy optimization algorithms have played an important role in recent empirical success of Reinforcement Learning (RL), the existing theoretical understanding of policy optimization remains rather limited -- they are either…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Qinghua Liu , Gellért Weisz , András György , Chi Jin , Csaba Szepesvári

Hybrid training methods for large language models combine supervised fine tuning (SFT) on expert demonstrations with reinforcement learning (RL) on model rollouts, typically at the sample level. We propose Entropy Gated Selective Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Yuelin Hu , Zhengxue Cheng , Wei Liu , Li Song

A fundamental challenge in model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) lies in the trade-off between generalization and robustness against exploitation errors in out-of-distribution (OOD) regions. While OOD samples may capture valid…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Hongqiang Lin , Dongxu Zhang , Yiding Sun , Mingzhe Li , Ning Yang , Haijun Zhang

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have seen remarkable progress, but key challenges remain. Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) is known for ensuring monotonic policy improvement through conservative updates within a trust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Zhengpeng Xie , Qiang Zhang , Fan Yang , Marco Hutter , Renjing Xu

Among the great successes of Reinforcement Learning (RL), self-play algorithms play an essential role in solving competitive games. Current self-play algorithms optimize the agent to maximize expected win-rates against its current or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Yuhua Jiang , Qihan Liu , Xiaoteng Ma , Chenghao Li , Yiqin Yang , Jun Yang , Bin Liang , Qianchuan Zhao

By leveraging differentiable dynamics, Reparameterization Policy Gradient (RPG) achieves high sample efficiency. However, current approaches are hindered by two critical limitations: the under-utilization of computationally expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Hai Zhong , Xun Wang , Zhuoran Li , Longbo Huang

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has exhibited promise in utilizing external knowledge, its generation process heavily depends on the quality and accuracy of the retrieved context. Large language models (LLMs) struggle to evaluate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Shi-Qi Yan , Quan Liu , Zhen-Hua Ling

Self-improvement via RL often fails on complex reasoning tasks because GRPO-style post-training methods rely on the model's initial ability to generate positive samples. Without guided exploration, these approaches merely reinforce what the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Ruiyang Zhou , Shuozhe Li , Amy Zhang , Liu Leqi

Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning (ERL) that applying Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) to optimize the weight parameters of Deep Neural Network (DNN) based policies has been widely regarded as an alternative to traditional reinforcement…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Lan Tang , Xiaxi Li , Jinyuan Zhang , Guiying Li , Peng Yang , Ke Tang

Experience replay enables reinforcement learning agents to memorize and reuse past experiences, just as humans replay memories for the situation at hand. Contemporary off-policy algorithms either replay past experiences uniformly or utilize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-21 Daochen Zha , Kwei-Herng Lai , Kaixiong Zhou , Xia Hu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise as intelligent agents in interactive decision-making tasks. Traditional approaches often depend on meticulously designed prompts, high-quality examples, or additional reward models for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Muning Wen , Junwei Liao , Cheng Deng , Jun Wang , Weinan Zhang , Ying Wen

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a lightweight variant of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Chen Wang , Lai Wei , Yanzhi Zhang , Chenyang Shao , Zedong Dan , Weiran Huang , Yuzhi Zhang , Yue Wang

We explore the use of Evolution Strategies (ES), a class of black box optimization algorithms, as an alternative to popular MDP-based RL techniques such as Q-learning and Policy Gradients. Experiments on MuJoCo and Atari show that ES is a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-11 Tim Salimans , Jonathan Ho , Xi Chen , Szymon Sidor , Ilya Sutskever

In RL, given a prompt, we sample a group of completions from a model and score them. Two questions follow: which completions should gain probability mass, and how should the parameters move to realize that change? Standard policy-gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Jean Kaddour

Efficient exploration remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, serving as a useful pretraining objective for data collection, particularly when an external reward function is unavailable. A principled formulation of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Jacob Adamczyk , Adam Kamoski , Rahul V. Kulkarni

The policy represented by the deep neural network can overfit the spurious features in observations, which hamper a reinforcement learning agent from learning effective policy. This issue becomes severe in high-dimensional state, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Md Masudur Rahman , Yexiang Xue

Reinforcement learning (RL) for LLM post-training faces a fundamental design choice: whether to use a learned critic as a baseline for policy optimization. Classical theory favors critic-based methods such as PPO for variance reduction, yet…

Large language models frequently exhibit suboptimal performance on low resource languages, primarily due to inefficient subword segmentation and systemic training data imbalances. In this paper, we propose Variable Entropy Policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Chonghan Liu , Yimin Du , Qi An , Xin He , Cunqi Zhai , Fei Tan , Weijia Lin , Xiaochun Gong , Yongchao Deng , Shousheng Jia , Xiangzheng Zhang