Related papers: Going Beyond Heuristics by Imposing Policy Improve…

On-policy reinforcement learning methods, like Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), often demand extensive data per update, leading to sample inefficiency. This paper introduces Reflective Policy…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a central post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. Yet existing methods share a common blind spot: they optimize policies…

Much of the recent success of deep reinforcement learning has been driven by regularized policy optimization (RPO) algorithms with strong performance across multiple domains. In this family of methods, agents are trained to maximize…

Text summarization is a crucial task that requires the simultaneous optimization of multiple objectives, including consistency, coherence, relevance, and fluency, which presents considerable challenges. Although large language models (LLMs)…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has achieved impressive empirical successes while relying on a small amount of human feedback. However, there is limited theoretical justification for this phenomenon. Additionally, most…

Resource-management tasks in modern operating and distributed systems continue to rely primarily on hand-designed heuristics for tasks such as scheduling, caching, or active queue management. Designing performant heuristics is an expensive,…

Large language model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance their ability to interact with external environments through tool use, particularly in search-based settings that require…

Interaction-aware planning for autonomous driving requires an exploration of a combinatorial solution space when using conventional search- or optimization-based motion planners. With Deep Reinforcement Learning, optimal driving strategies…

Reward shaping is critical in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly for complex tasks where sparse rewards can hinder learning. However, choosing effective shaping rewards from a set of reward functions in a computationally efficient…

Production systems use heuristics because they are faster or scale better than their optimal counterparts. Yet, practitioners are often unaware of the performance gap between a heuristic and the optimum or between two heuristics in…

The application of reinforcement learning (RL) to dynamic resource allocation in optical networks has been the focus of intense research activity in recent years, with almost 100 peer-reviewed papers. We present a review of progress in the…

Reward-based alignment methods for large language models (LLMs) face two key limitations: vulnerability to reward hacking, where models exploit flaws in the reward signal; and reliance on brittle, labor-intensive prompt engineering when…

Group-based reinforcement learning (RL), such as GRPO, has advanced the capabilities of large language models on long-horizon agentic tasks. To enable more fine-grained policy updates, recent research has increasingly shifted toward…

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most popular state-of-the-art on-policy algorithms that has become a standard baseline in modern reinforcement learning with applications in numerous fields. Though it delivers stable…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for inducing explicit reasoning behaviors in large language and vision-language models. However, reasoning-oriented RL post-training remains fundamentally challenging due to…

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) shows promise in training tool-use Large Language Models (LLMs) using verifiable outcome rewards, existing methods largely overlook the potential of reasoning rewards based on chain-of-thought quality for…

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.…

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has recently emerged as a practical recipe for aligning large language models with verifiable objectives. However, under sparse terminal rewards, GRPO often stalls because rollouts within a group…

Recent large reasoning models (LRMs) driven by reinforcement learning algorithms (e.g., GRPO) have achieved remarkable performance on challenging reasoning tasks. However, these models suffer from overthinking, generating unnecessarily long…

Engagement-optimized adaptive tutoring systems may prioritize short-term behavioral signals over sustained learning outcomes, creating structural incentives for reward hacking in reinforcement learning policies. We formalize this challenge…