Related papers: Polychromic Objectives for Reinforcement Learning
Continual post-training (CPT) is a popular and effective technique for adapting foundation models like multimodal large language models to specific and ever-evolving downstream tasks. While existing research has primarily concentrated on…
Among the great successes of Reinforcement Learning (RL), self-play algorithms play an essential role in solving competitive games. Current self-play algorithms optimize the agent to maximize expected win-rates against its current or…
In complex reinforcement learning (RL) problems, policies with similar rewards may have substantially different behaviors. It remains a fundamental challenge to optimize rewards while also discovering as many diverse strategies as possible,…
Recent studies suggest that Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) is inherently more resilient to catastrophic forgetting than Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). However, whether RFT (e.g., GRPO) can effectively overcome forgetting in challenging…
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.…
The famous Policy Iteration algorithm alternates between policy improvement and policy evaluation. Implementations of this algorithm with several variants of the latter evaluation stage, e.g, $n$-step and trace-based returns, have been…
Policy gradient methods have shown success in learning control policies for high-dimensional dynamical systems. Their biggest downside is the amount of exploration they require before yielding high-performing policies. In a lifelong…
On-policy reinforcement learning (RL), particularly Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has become the dominant paradigm for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). While policy ratio clipping…
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has emerged as one of the most effective ways to improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) in downstream tasks. However, SFT can have difficulty generalizing when the underlying data distribution…
Language models must now generalize out of the box to novel environments and work inside inference-scaling search procedures, such as AlphaEvolve, that select rollouts with a variety of task-specific reward functions. Unfortunately, the…
Policy gradient lies at the core of deep reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous domains. Despite much success, it is often observed in practice that RL training with policy gradient can fail for many reasons, even on standard control…
Stateful policies play an important role in reinforcement learning, such as handling partially observable environments, enhancing robustness, or imposing an inductive bias directly into the policy structure. The conventional method for…
Pretrained on large-scale and diverse datasets, VLA models demonstrate strong generalization and adaptability as general-purpose robotic policies. However, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), which serves as the primary mechanism for adapting…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven to be a highly effective strategy for endowing Large Language Models (LLMs) with robust multi-step reasoning abilities. However, its design and optimizations remain tailored…
We work towards a unifying paradigm for accelerating policy optimization methods in reinforcement learning (RL) by integrating foresight in the policy improvement step via optimistic and adaptive updates. Leveraging the connection between…
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a reliable approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. Among the plethora of RLHF techniques, proximal policy optimization (PPO) is of the most…
This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…
Post-training methods, especially Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), play an important role in improving large language models' (LLMs) complex reasoning abilities. However, the dominant two-stage pipeline (SFT…
This paper considers the problem of learning safe policies in the context of reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, we consider the notion of probabilistic safety. This is, we aim to design policies that maintain the state of the…
In numerous reinforcement learning (RL) problems involving safety-critical systems, a key challenge lies in balancing multiple objectives while simultaneously meeting all stringent safety constraints. To tackle this issue, we propose a…