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In reinforcement learning, the softmax parametrization is the standard approach for policies over discrete action spaces. However, it fails to capture the order relationship between actions. Motivated by a real-world industrial problem, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Simón Weinberger , Jairo Cugliari

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

Due to limited resources and public safety concerns, deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents for many cyber-physical systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles) are first trained in simulators. However, when deployed in real world environments,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Gengyue Han , Yiheng Feng

Reinforcement Learning and Imitation Learning have achieved widespread success in many domains but remain constrained during real-world deployment. One of the main issues is the additional requirements that were not considered during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Pengcheng Wang , Xinghao Zhu , Yuxin Chen , Chenfeng Xu , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Chenran Li

We study a reinforcement learning setting, where the state transition function is a convex combination of a stochastic continuous function and a deterministic function. Such a setting generalizes the widely-studied stochastic state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-03 Qingpeng Cai , Ling Pan , Pingzhong Tang

Recent advances in GPU-based parallel simulation have enabled practitioners to collect large amounts of data and train complex control policies using deep reinforcement learning (RL), on commodity GPUs. However, such successes for RL in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Eliot Xing , Vernon Luk , Jean Oh

Policy gradient methods hold great potential for solving complex continuous control tasks. Still, their training efficiency can be improved by exploiting structure within the optimization problem. Recent work indicates that supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Jan Schneider , Pierre Schumacher , Simon Guist , Le Chen , Daniel Häufle , Bernhard Schölkopf , Dieter Büchler

The performance of off-policy learning, including deep Q-learning and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), critically depends on the choice of the exploration policy. Existing exploration methods are mostly based on adding noise to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-28 Tianbing Xu , Qiang Liu , Liang Zhao , Jian Peng

Credit assignment in Meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is still poorly understood. Existing methods either neglect credit assignment to pre-adaptation behavior or implement it naively. This leads to poor sample-efficiency during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-14 Jonas Rothfuss , Dennis Lee , Ignasi Clavera , Tamim Asfour , Pieter Abbeel

Gradient-based optimizers are highly sensitive to design choices in their adaptive learning rate mechanisms. To address this limitation, we introduce POP, a meta-learned Reinforcement Learning (RL) policy that predicts adaptive learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Jan Kobiolka , Christian Frey , Gresa Shala , Arlind Kadra , Erind Bedalli , Josif Grabocka

Reinforcement learning (RL) in large or infinite state spaces is notoriously challenging, both theoretically (where worst-case sample and computational complexities must scale with state space cardinality) and experimentally (where function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Marcel Hussing , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth , Sikata Bela Sengupta , Jessica Sorrell

Uncertainties in transition dynamics pose a critical challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), often resulting in performance degradation of trained policies when deployed on hardware. Many robust RL approaches follow two strategies:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Xulin Chen , Ruipeng Liu , Zhenyu Gan , Garrett E. Katz

Social goods, such as healthcare, smart city, and information networks, often produce ordered event data in continuous time. The generative processes of these event data can be very complex, requiring flexible models to capture their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-29 Shuang Li , Shuai Xiao , Shixiang Zhu , Nan Du , Yao Xie , Le Song

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

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

In this paper, a new population-guided parallel learning scheme is proposed to enhance the performance of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). In the proposed scheme, multiple identical learners with their own value-functions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Whiyoung Jung , Giseung Park , Youngchul Sung

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Alekh Agarwal , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Gaurav Mahajan

In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), interactions with the environment are limited due to cost or feasibility. This presents a challenge to traditional RL algorithms since the max-return objective involves an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-05 Ofir Nachum , Bo Dai , Ilya Kostrikov , Yinlam Chow , Lihong Li , Dale Schuurmans

Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently use on-policy algorithms, such as PPO or GRPO. However, policy lag from distributed training architectures and differences between the training and inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Daniel Ritter , Owen Oertell , Bradley Guo , Jonathan Chang , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

Deep Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms employ value networks to drive the learning of parameterized policies and reduce the variance of the gradient estimates. However, value function approximation gets stuck in local optima and struggles to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Enrico Marchesini , Christopher Amato