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While policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) achieves tremendous successes in practice, it is significantly less understood in theory, especially compared with value-based RL. In particular, it remains elusive how to design a provably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Qi Cai , Zhuoran Yang , Chi Jin , Zhaoran Wang

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) which seeks to learn a good policy based on a fixed, pre-collected dataset. A fundamental challenge behind this task is the distributional shift due to the dataset lacking sufficient exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Wenzhuo Zhou

By leveraging differentiable dynamics, Reparameterization Policy Gradient (RPG) achieves high sample efficiency. However, current approaches are hindered by two critical limitations: the under-utilization of computationally expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Hai Zhong , Xun Wang , Zhuoran Li , Longbo Huang

Reinforcement learning agents need exploratory behaviors to escape from local optima. These behaviors may include both immediate dithering perturbation and temporally consistent exploration. To achieve these, a stochastic policy model that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Sirui Xie , Junning Huang , Lanxin Lei , Chunxiao Liu , Zheng Ma , Wei Zhang , Liang Lin

What is a good exploration strategy for an agent that interacts with an environment in the absence of external rewards? Ideally, we would like to get a policy driving towards a uniform state-action visitation (highly exploring) in a minimum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-20 Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli

Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Andreas Doerr , Michael Volpp , Marc Toussaint , Sebastian Trimpe , Christian Daniel

We revisit Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in both on-policy and off-policy optimization regimes. Our motivation comes from recent work on off-policy Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), which improves training stability, sampling…

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Alessandro Montenegro , Marco Mussi , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models (LLMs). Current RLVR methods often overemphasize exploitation, leading to entropy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Liang Chen , Xueting Han , Qizhou Wang , Bo Han , Jing Bai , Hinrich Schutze , Kam-Fai Wong

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a powerful tool used for addressing complex challenges in mobile networks. This paper investigates the application of two DRL models, on-policy and off-policy, in the field of resource allocation for…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2024-12-04 Manal Mehdaoui , Amine Abouaomar

Proximal Policy Optimization with Adaptive Exploration (axPPO) is introduced as a novel learning algorithm. This paper investigates the exploration-exploitation tradeoff within the context of reinforcement learning and aims to contribute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Andrei Lixandru

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has gained increasing attention in control engineering. Especially, policy gradient methods are widely used. In this work, we improve the tracking performance of proximal policy optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-21 Jana Mayer , Johannes Westermann , Juan Pedro Gutiérrez H. Muriedas , Uwe Mettin , Alexander Lampe

We study reinforcement learning in hybrid discrete-continuous action spaces, such as settings where the discrete component selects a regime (or index) and the continuous component optimizes within it -- a structure common in robotics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Matias Alvo , Daniel Russo , Yash Kanoria

Score-function based methods for policy learning, such as REINFORCE and PPO, have delivered strong results in game-playing and robotics, yet their high variance often undermines training stability. Using pathwise policy gradients, i.e.…

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is among the most widely used deep reinforcement learning algorithms, yet its theoretical foundations remain incomplete. Most importantly, convergence and understanding of fundamental PPO advantages remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Leif Doering , Daniel Schmidt , Moritz Melcher , Sebastian Kassing , Benedikt Wille , Tilman Aach , Simon Weissmann

Having access to an exploring restart distribution (the so-called wide coverage assumption) is critical with policy gradient methods. This is due to the fact that, while the objective function is insensitive to updates in unlikely states,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-30 Marco Miani , Maurizio Parton , Marco Romito

The policy gradient method enjoys the simplicity of the objective where the agent optimizes the cumulative reward directly. Moreover, in the continuous action domain, parameterized distribution of action distribution allows easy control of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Md Masudur Rahman , Yexiang Xue

A key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is managing the exploration-exploitation trade-off without sacrificing sample efficiency. Policy gradient (PG) methods excel in exploitation through fine-grained, gradient-based optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Zelal Su "Lain" Mustafaoglu , Keshav Pingali , Risto Miikkulainen

With reinforcement learning, an agent could learn complex behaviors from high-level abstractions of the task. However, exploration and reward shaping remained challenging for existing methods, especially in scenarios where the extrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Jie Chen , Wenjun Xu