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This paper introduces two novel modifications to the Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO) algorithm [1], approached from a mixed-policy perspective. Standard policy gradient methods can suffer from instability and sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Hongze Tan , Yuchen Li

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Shangding Gu , Bilgehan Sel , Yuhao Ding , Lu Wang , Qingwei Lin , Alois Knoll , Ming Jin

Ensuring the safety of Reinforcement Learning (RL) is crucial for its deployment in real-world applications. Nevertheless, managing the trade-off between reward and safety during exploration presents a significant challenge. Improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Shangding Gu , Bilgehan Sel , Yuhao Ding , Lu Wang , Qingwei Lin , Ming Jin , Alois Knoll

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Santiago Paternain , Juan Andres Bazerque , Alejandro Ribeiro

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown exceptional performance across various applications, enabling autonomous agents to learn optimal policies through interaction with their environments. However, traditional RL frameworks often face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Rui Liu , Anish Gupta , Erfaun Noorani , Pratap Tokekar

Traditional policy gradient methods are fundamentally flawed. Natural gradients converge quicker and better, forming the foundation of contemporary Reinforcement Learning such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-07 W. J. A. van Heeswijk

Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning have become increasingly prevalent for state-of-the-art performance in continuous control tasks. Novel methods typically benchmark against a few key algorithms such as deep deterministic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-15 Riashat Islam , Peter Henderson , Maziar Gomrokchi , Doina Precup

Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Shuze Daniel Liu , Claire Chen , Shangtong Zhang

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

Reinforcement learning has achieved great success in many decision-making tasks, and traditional reinforcement learning algorithms are mainly designed for obtaining a single optimal solution. However, recent works show the importance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-24 Fanqi Lin , Shiyu Huang , Weiwei Tu

A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-21 Paulo Rauber , Avinash Ummadisingu , Filipe Mutz , Juergen Schmidhuber

Gradient boosting is a state-of-the-art prediction technique that sequentially produces a model in the form of linear combinations of simple predictors---typically decision trees---by solving an infinite-dimensional convex optimization…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-07-18 Gérard Biau , Benoît Cadre

Modern meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) methods are mainly developed based on model-agnostic meta-learning, which performs policy gradient steps across tasks to maximize policy performance. However, the gradient conflict problem is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-22 Haozhi Wang , Qing Wang , Yunfeng Shao , Dong Li , Jianye Hao , Yinchuan Li

This paper proposes a novel formulation for reinforcement learning (RL) with large language models, explaining why and under what conditions the true sequence-level reward can be optimized via a surrogate token-level objective in policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Chujie Zheng , Kai Dang , Bowen Yu , Mingze Li , Huiqiang Jiang , Junrong Lin , Yuqiong Liu , Hao Lin , Chencan Wu , Feng Hu , An Yang , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

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

We develop a generic policy gradient method with the global optimality guarantee for robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While policy gradient methods are widely used for solving dynamic decision problems due to their scalable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Qiuhao Wang , Shaohang Xu , Chin Pang Ho , Marek Petrik

An efficient policy search algorithm should estimate the local gradient of the objective function, with respect to the policy parameters, from as few trials as possible. Whereas most policy search methods estimate this gradient by observing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-06-18 Gregory Lawrence , Stuart Russell

Policy gradient methods are extensively used in reinforcement learning as a way to optimize expected return. In this paper, we explore the evolution of the policy parameters, for a special class of exactly solvable POMDPs, as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Gavin McCracken , Colin Daniels , Rosie Zhao , Anna Brandenberger , Prakash Panangaden , Doina Precup