English
Related papers

Related papers: Sampling Complexity of TD and PPO in RKHS

200 papers

In supervised learning using kernel methods, we often encounter a large-scale finite-sum minimization over a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). Large-scale finite-sum problems can be solved using efficient variants of Newton method,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Ting-Jui Chang , Shahin Shahrampour

We introduce Proximal Policy Distillation (PPD), a novel policy distillation method that integrates student-driven distillation and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to increase sample efficiency and to leverage the additional rewards that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Giacomo Spigler

We introduce the neural tangent kernel (NTK) regime for two-layer neural operators and analyze their generalization properties. For early-stopped gradient descent (GD), we derive fast convergence rates that are known to be minimax optimal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-24 Mike Nguyen , Nicole Mücke

The advantage function is a central concept in RL that helps reduce variance in policy gradient estimates. For language modeling, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) was proposed to use the within-group sample mean as a baseline for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Hu Wang , Congbo Ma , Ian Reid , Mohammad Yaqub

Expressive generative models have advanced robotic manipulation by capturing complex, multi-modal action distributions over temporally extended trajectories. However, fine-tuning these policies via RL remains challenging due to instability…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Yuhui Chen , Haoran Li , Zhennan Jiang , Yuxing Qin , Yuxuan Wan , Weiheng Liu , Dongbin Zhao

This paper tackles the growing issue of excessive data transmission in networks. With increasing traffic, backhaul links and core networks are under significant traffic, leading to the investigation of caching solutions at edge routers.…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Farnaz Niknia , Ping Wang , Zixu Wang , Aakash Agarwal , Adib S. Rezaei

Decoupled PPO has been a successful reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to deal with the high data staleness under the asynchronous RL setting. Decoupled loss used in decoupled PPO improves coupled-loss style of algorithms' (e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Xiaocan Li , Shiliang Wu , Zheng Shen

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has significantly advanced the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), particularly by boosting their mathematical performance. However, GRPO and related entropy-regularization methods…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Xingyu Lin , Yilin Wen , En Wang , Du Su , Wenbin Liu , Chenfu Bao , Zhonghou Lv

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a powerful algorithm for improving the reasoning capabilities of language models, but often fails to improve small models due to sparse rewards on difficult tasks. Existing works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Soo Min Kwon , Ziteng Sun , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Himanshu Jain , Sanjiv Kumar

While originally developed for continuous control problems, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has emerged as the work-horse of a variety of reinforcement learning (RL) applications, including the fine-tuning of generative models.…

We propose kernel distributionally robust optimization (Kernel DRO) using insights from the robust optimization theory and functional analysis. Our method uses reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS) to construct a wide range of convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-28 Jia-Jie Zhu , Wittawat Jitkrittum , Moritz Diehl , Bernhard Schölkopf

In this paper we consider the problem of obtaining sharp bounds for the performance of temporal difference (TD) methods with linear function approximation for policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes. We show that a simple…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-18 Sergey Samsonov , Daniil Tiapkin , Alexey Naumov , Eric Moulines

In this work, we show that discretizing action space for continuous control is a simple yet powerful technique for on-policy optimization. The explosion in the number of discrete actions can be efficiently addressed by a policy with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-23 Yunhao Tang , Shipra Agrawal

This paper studies the alignment process of generative models with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). We first identify the primary challenges of existing popular methods like offline PPO and offline DPO as lacking in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Wei Xiong , Hanze Dong , Chenlu Ye , Ziqi Wang , Han Zhong , Heng Ji , Nan Jiang , Tong Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-15 Xiangxiang Chu

We present a novel distributionally robust framework for dynamic programming that uses kernel methods to design feedback control policies. Specifically, we leverage kernel mean embedding to map the transition probabilities governing the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-20 Licio Romao , Ashish R. Hota , Alessandro Abate

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a highly popular policy-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach. However, we observe that the homogeneous exploration process in PPO could cause an unexpected stability issue in the training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-14 Qisheng Zhang , Zhen Guo , Audun Jøsang , Lance M. Kaplan , Feng Chen , Dong H. Jeong , Jin-Hee Cho

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a scalable alternative to Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) by eliminating the learned critic and instead estimating advantages through group-relative comparisons of trajectories.…

This paper delves into the problem of safe reinforcement learning (RL) in a partially observable environment with the aim of achieving safe-reachability objectives. In traditional partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-04 Xiaoyuan Cheng , Boli Chen , Liz Varga , Yukun Hu

This paper studies the policy mirror descent (PMD) method, which is a general policy optimization framework in reinforcement learning and can cover a wide range of policy gradient methods by specifying difference mirror maps. Existing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-01 Wenye Li , Hongxu Chen , Jiacai Liu , Ke Wei