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Recent studies in using deep learning to solve routing problems focus on construction heuristics, the solutions of which are still far from optimality. Improvement heuristics have great potential to narrow this gap by iteratively refining a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-05-12 Yaoxin Wu , Wen Song , Zhiguang Cao , Jie Zhang , Andrew Lim

Reinforcement learning algorithms are fundamental to align large language models with human preferences and to enhance their reasoning capabilities. However, current reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from training instability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Yaru Hao , Li Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Zewen Chi , Furu Wei

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

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for facilitating the self-improvement of large language models (LLMs), particularly in the domain of complex reasoning tasks. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Ziru Liu , Cheng Gong , Xinyu Fu , Yaofang Liu , Ran Chen , Shoubo Hu , Suiyun Zhang , Rui Liu , Qingfu Zhang , Dandan Tu

There has been significant progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. Nevertheless, finding suitable hyperparameter configurations and reward functions remains challenging even for experts, and performance heavily relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Julian Dierkes , Emma Cramer , Holger H. Hoos , Sebastian Trimpe

We provide a framework for accelerating reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by heuristics constructed from domain knowledge or offline data. Tabula rasa RL algorithms require environment interactions or computation that scales with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Ching-An Cheng , Andrey Kolobov , Adith Swaminathan

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to maximize the return while adhering to predefined constraint limits, which represent domain-specific safety requirements. In continuous control settings, where learning agents govern system…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Somnath Hazra , Pallab Dasgupta , Soumyajit Dey

We present Memory Augmented Policy Optimization (MAPO), a simple and novel way to leverage a memory buffer of promising trajectories to reduce the variance of policy gradient estimate. MAPO is applicable to deterministic environments with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-15 Chen Liang , Mohammad Norouzi , Jonathan Berant , Quoc Le , Ni Lao

Reinforcement learning has significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex problem-solving tasks. Recently, the introduction of DeepSeek R1 has inspired a surge of interest in leveraging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Jinghang Han , Jiawei Chen , Hang Shao , Hao Ma , Mingcheng Li , Xintian Shen , Lihao Zheng , Wei Chen , Tao Wei , Lihua Zhang

Because it is difficult to precisely specify complex objectives, reinforcement learning policies are often optimized using proxy reward functions that only approximate the true goal. However, optimizing proxy rewards frequently leads to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Cassidy Laidlaw , Shivam Singhal , Anca Dragan

Deep reinforcement learning can match or exceed human performance in stable contexts, but with minor changes to the environment artificial networks, unlike humans, often cannot adapt. Humans rely on a combination of heuristics to simplify…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Erik J Peterson , Necati Alp Müyesser , Timothy Verstynen , Kyle Dunovan

Policy optimization for large language models often suffers from sparse reward signals in multi-step reasoning tasks. Critic-free methods like GRPO assign a single normalized outcome reward to all tokens, providing limited guidance for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Ruiyi Ding , Yongxuan Lv , Xianhui Meng , Jiahe Song , Chao Wang , Chen Jiang , Yuan Cheng

Exploration is essential in modern learning, from reinforcement learning environments with small neural policies to large language models (LLMs). Existing work, such as DPO, leverages full sequence log-likelihoods to capture an entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Gaurish Trivedi , Alakh Sharma , Kartikey Singh Bhandari , Dhruv Kumar , Pratik Narang , Jagat Sesh Challa

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have popularized test-time scaling, where models generate additional reasoning tokens before producing final answers. These approaches have demonstrated significant performance improvements on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Wenxun Wu , Yuanyang Li , Guhan Chen , Linyue Wang , Hongyang Chen

Multi-turn human-AI collaboration is fundamental to deploying interactive services such as adaptive tutoring, conversational recommendation, and professional consultation. However, optimizing these interactions via reinforcement learning is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Haoyu Wang , Yuxin Chen , Liang Luo , Buyun Zhang , Ellie Dingqiao Wen , Pan Li

Ensuring safety is important for the practical deployment of reinforcement learning (RL). Various challenges must be addressed, such as handling stochasticity in the environments, providing rigorous guarantees of persistent state-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Milan Ganai , Zheng Gong , Chenning Yu , Sylvia Herbert , Sicun Gao

We consider the problem of learning control policies that optimize a reward function while satisfying constraints due to considerations of safety, fairness, or other costs. We propose a new algorithm, Projection-Based Constrained Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

Most reinforcement learning algorithms seek a single optimal strategy that solves a given task. However, it can often be valuable to learn a diverse set of solutions, for instance, to make an agent's interaction with users more engaging, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Wentse Chen , Shiyu Huang , Yuan Chiang , Tim Pearce , Wei-Wei Tu , Ting Chen , Jun Zhu

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

We consider a settings of hierarchical reinforcement learning, in which the reward is a sum of components. For each component we are given a policy that maximizes it and our goal is to assemble a policy from the individual policies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-06 Tom Zahavy , Avinatan Hasidim , Haim Kaplan , Yishay Mansour