English
Related papers

Related papers: Exploration from a Primal-Dual Lens: Value-Incenti…

200 papers

Robotic real-world reinforcement learning (RL) with vision-language-action (VLA) models is bottlenecked by sparse, handcrafted rewards and inefficient exploration. We introduce VLAC, a general process reward model built upon InternVL and…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) significantly enhances the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), yet applying it to multi-turn agentic tasks remains challenging due to the long-horizon nature of interactions and the stochasticity…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Jingyue Gao , Yanjiang Guo , Xiaoshuai Chen , Jianyu Chen

This scientific paper propose a novel portfolio optimization model using an improved deep reinforcement learning algorithm. The objective function of the optimization model is the weighted sum of the expectation and value at risk(VaR) of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-30 Boyi Jin

Actor-critic methods are widely used in offline reinforcement learning practice, but are not so well-understood theoretically. We propose a new offline actor-critic algorithm that naturally incorporates the pessimism principle, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-20 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright , Emma Brunskill

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet current RLVR methods often explore poorly, leading to premature convergence and entropy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Runpeng Dai , Linfeng Song , Haolin Liu , Zhenwen Liang , Dian Yu , Haitao Mi , Zhaopeng Tu , Rui Liu , Tong Zheng , Hongtu Zhu , Dong Yu

Scalable and effective exploration remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). While there are methods with optimality guarantees in the setting of discrete state and action spaces, these methods cannot be applied in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-30 Rein Houthooft , Xi Chen , Yan Duan , John Schulman , Filip De Turck , Pieter Abbeel

We examine online safe multi-agent reinforcement learning using constrained Markov games in which agents compete by maximizing their expected total rewards under a constraint on expected total utilities. Our focus is confined to an episodic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Dongsheng Ding , Xiaohan Wei , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Mihailo R. Jovanović

Policy optimization methods remain a powerful workhorse in empirical Reinforcement Learning (RL), with a focus on neural policies that can easily reason over complex and continuous state and/or action spaces. Theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Fei Feng , Wotao Yin , Alekh Agarwal , Lin F. Yang

We study robust reinforcement learning (RL) with the goal of determining a well-performing policy that is robust against model mismatch between the training simulator and the testing environment. Previous policy-based robust RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Ruida Zhou , Tao Liu , Min Cheng , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar , Chao Tian

Current model-based reinforcement learning approaches use the model simply as a learned black-box simulator to augment the data for policy optimization or value function learning. In this paper, we show how to make more effective use of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Ignasi Clavera , Violet Fu , Pieter Abbeel

In traditional reinforcement learning, an agent maximizes the reward collected during its interaction with the environment by approximating the optimal policy through the estimation of value functions. Typically, given a state s and action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-20 Shangda Li , Selina Bing , Steven Yang

While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Han Zhong , Xun Deng , Ethan X. Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Runze Li

Optimistic value estimates provide one mechanism for directed exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). The agent acts greedily with respect to an estimate of the value plus what can be seen as a value bonus. The value bonus can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Abdul Wahab , Raksha Kumaraswamy , Martha White

Modern offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods find performant actor-critics, however, fine-tuning these actor-critics online with value-based RL algorithms typically causes immediate drops in performance. We provide evidence consistent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Nathan Samuel de Lara , Florian Shkurti

Actor-critic methods, a type of model-free reinforcement learning (RL), have achieved state-of-the-art performances in many real-world domains in continuous control. Despite their success, the wide-scale deployment of these models is still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-14 Srinjoy Roy , Saptam Bakshi , Tamal Maharaj

Value-based methods of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), especially the value decomposition methods, have been demonstrated on a range of challenging cooperative tasks. However, current methods pay little attention to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Xiaoteng Ma , Yiqin Yang , Chenghao Li , Yiwen Lu , Qianchuan Zhao , Yang Jun

Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yibo Wang , Jiang Zhao

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes with an unknown cost function and address the problem of learning a policy from a finite set of expert demonstrations. We assume that the learner is not allowed to interact with the expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-30 Angeliki Kamoutsi , Goran Banjac , John Lygeros

In value-based reinforcement learning (RL), unlike in supervised learning, the agent faces not a single, stationary, approximation problem, but a sequence of value prediction problems. Each time the policy improves, the nature of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Will Dabney , André Barreto , Mark Rowland , Robert Dadashi , John Quan , Marc G. Bellemare , David Silver

Offline constrained reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward subject to constraints on expected cumulative cost using an existing dataset. In this paper, we propose Primal-Dual-Critic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Kihyuk Hong , Yuhang Li , Ambuj Tewari