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Policy-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) has established itself as the dominant paradigm in generative recommendation for optimizing sequential user interactions. However, when applied to offline historical logs, these methods suffer a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Jie Jiang , Yusen Huo , Xiangxin Zhan , Changping Wang , Jun Zhang

Modern neural networks are expected to simultaneously satisfy a host of desirable properties: accurate fitting to training data, generalization to unseen inputs, parameter and computational efficiency, and robustness to adversarial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Melih Barsbey , Antônio H. Ribeiro , Umut Şimşekli , Tolga Birdal

Adversarial training is one of the most effective approaches defending against adversarial examples for deep learning models. Unlike other defense strategies, adversarial training aims to promote the robustness of models intrinsically.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-22 Tao Bai , Jinqi Luo , Jun Zhao , Bihan Wen , Qian Wang

In reinforcement learning, an agent attempts to learn high-performing behaviors through interacting with the environment, such behaviors are often quantified in the form of a reward function. However some aspects of behavior-such as ones…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Yiming Zhang , Quan Vuong , Keith W. Ross

Reinforcement learning (RL) has re-emerged as a natural approach for training interactive LLM agents in real-world environments. However, directly applying the widely used Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm to multi-turn…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Junbo Li , Peng Zhou , Rui Meng , Meet P. Vadera , Lihong Li , Yang Li

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) and its variants dominate Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning (MTRL) due to their off-policy sample efficiency, while on-policy methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) remain underexplored. We diagnose that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yuanpeng Li , Gefei Lin , Annie Qu , Rui Miao

Reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous state-action spaces remains challenging in scientific computing due to poor sample efficiency and lack of pathwise physical consistency. We introduce Differential Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Minh Nguyen , Chandrajit Bajaj

Most reinforcement learning algorithms seek a single optimal strategy that solves a given task. However, it can often be valuable to learn a diverse set of solutions, for instance, to make an agent's interaction with users more engaging, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Wentse Chen , Shiyu Huang , Yuan Chiang , Tim Pearce , Wei-Wei Tu , Ting Chen , Jun Zhu

Adversarial training, which is to enhance robustness against adversarial attacks, has received much attention because it is easy to generate human-imperceptible perturbations of data to deceive a given deep neural network. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-02 Dongyoon Yang , Insung Kong , Yongdai Kim

This paper proposes a new robust optimization (RO) formulation namely the RO under objective functional uncertainty (ObRO). The ObRO adopts a min-max structure where the inner problem finds the worst-case objective function in a continuous…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Yue Song , Yuxi Lu , Gang Li , Kairui Feng , Qi Liu

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

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) offers advanced solutions to constrained optimal control problems. Existing studies in safe RL implicitly assume continuity in policy functions, where policies map states to actions in a smooth,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Wenjun Zou , Yao Lyu , Jie Li , Yujie Yang , Shengbo Eben Li , Jingliang Duan , Xianyuan Zhan , Jingjing Liu , Yaqin Zhang , Keqiang Li

We propose a principled framework that combines adversarial training and provable robustness verification for training certifiably robust neural networks. We formulate the training problem as a joint optimization problem with both empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Jiameng Fan , Wenchao Li

Wasserstein Policy Optimization (WPO) is a recently proposed reinforcement learning algorithm that leverages Wasserstein gradient flows to optimize stochastic policies in continuous action spaces. Despite its empirical success, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 David Šiška , Yufei Zhang

Adversarial training (AT) constructs robust neural networks by incorporating adversarial perturbations into natural data. However, it is plagued by the issue of robust overfitting (RO), which severely damages the model's robustness. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Chaojian Yu , Xiaolong Shi , Jun Yu , Bo Han , Tongliang Liu

Existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods for large language models have advanced rapidly, yet their design has largely been guided by heuristics rather than systematic theoretical principles. This gap limits our…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-16 Zixun Huang , Jiayi Sheng , Zeyu Zheng

Ensuring safety is important for the practical deployment of reinforcement learning (RL). Various challenges must be addressed, such as handling stochasticity in the environments, providing rigorous guarantees of persistent state-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Milan Ganai , Zheng Gong , Chenning Yu , Sylvia Herbert , Sicun Gao

We introduce a new class of optimal-transport-regularized divergences, $D^c$, constructed via an infimal convolution between an information divergence, $D$, and an optimal-transport (OT) cost, $C$, and study their use in distributionally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Jeremiah Birrell , Reza Ebrahimi

Aligning large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) for complex reasoning via reinforcement learning is often hampered by the limitations of existing policy optimization algorithms, such as static training schedules and the rigid, uniform…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Yunhao Wang , Ziting Li , Shuai Chen , Tao Liu , Chao Song , Junjie Jiang , Jian Zhu , Peng Gao , Bin Qin

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), as the widely employed policy based reinforcement learning (RL) methods, are prone to converge to a sub-optimal solution as they limit the policy representation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Jun Song , Chaoyue Zhao