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As the most successful variant and improvement for Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO), proximal policy optimization (PPO) has been widely applied across various domains with several advantages: efficient data utilization, easy…

Improving and understanding the training dynamics and reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become essential for their deployment in AI-based security tools, such as software vulnerability detection. In this work, we present an…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards has recently advanced the capabilities of Large Language Models in complex reasoning tasks by providing explicit rule-based supervision. Among RLVR methods, GRPO and its variants have achieved…

Modern deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are motivated by either the generalised policy iteration (GPI) or trust-region learning (TRL) frameworks. However, algorithms that strictly respect these theoretical frameworks have proven…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as the key driver for post-training complex reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet online RL introduces significant instability and computational overhead. Offline RL offers a compelling…

Policy gradient methods usually rely on entropy regularization to prevent premature convergence. However, maximizing entropy indiscriminately pushes the policy towards a uniform distribution, often overriding the reward signal if not…

Process reward models (PRMs) allow for fine-grained credit assignment in reinforcement learning (RL), and seemingly contrast with outcome reward models (ORMs), which assign a single reward to an entire trajectory. However, we provide…

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) learns a reward function to explain expert demonstrations. Modern IRL methods often use the adversarial (minimax) formulation that alternates between reward and policy optimization, which often lead to…

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), recently introduced by DeepSeek, is a critic-free reinforcement learning algorithm for fine-tuning large language models. GRPO replaces the value function in Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with…

Deep reinforcement learning has been able to solve various tasks successfully, however, due to the construction of policy gradient and training dynamics, tuning deep reinforcement learning models remains challenging. As one of the most…

In this paper, we tackle the challenging problem of delayed rewards in reinforcement learning (RL). While Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has emerged as a leading Policy Gradient method, its performance can degrade under delayed rewards.…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key driver of language model reasoning. Among RL algorithms, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is the de facto standard, avoiding the need for a critic by using per-prompt baselines and…

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), as the widely employed policy based reinforcement learning (RL) methods, are prone to converge to a sub-optimal solution as they limit the policy representation…

Reinforcement Learning, particularly through policy gradient methods, has played a central role in enabling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, the optimization stability of policy gradients in this setting remains…

Inspired by the seminal work on Stein Variational Inference and Stein Variational Policy Gradient, we derived a method to generate samples from the posterior variational parameter distribution by \textit{explicitly} minimizing the KL…

Differentiable reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks like DiffRO offer a powerful approach for controllable text-to-speech (TTS), but are vulnerable to reward hacking, particularly for nuanced tasks like emotion control. The policy model…

Improving sample efficiency has been a longstanding goal in reinforcement learning. This paper proposes $\mathtt{VRMPO}$ algorithm: a sample efficient policy gradient method with stochastic mirror descent. In $\mathtt{VRMPO}$, a novel…

Deep Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms employ value networks to drive the learning of parameterized policies and reduce the variance of the gradient estimates. However, value function approximation gets stuck in local optima and struggles to…

Reinforcement learning (RL) allows vision-language-action (VLA) policies to generalize beyond their training distribution by optimizing directly for task success, but post-training is computationally expensive. A natural response has been…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable reward has recently emerged as a central paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs); however, prevailing mean-based methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), suffer from…