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Multi-turn tool calling is challenging for Large Language Models (LLMs) because rewards are sparse and exploration is expensive. A common recipe, SFT followed by GRPO, can stall when within-group reward variation is low (e.g., more rollouts…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Haitian Zhong , Jixiu Zhai , Lei Song , Jiang Bian , Qiang Liu , Tieniu Tan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), encounter the challenge of distribution shift. Current approaches typically address this issue…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Qiyuan Deng , Xuefeng Bai , Kehai Chen , Yaowei Wang , Liqiang Nie , Min Zhang

Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as the standard for training reasoning capabilities in large language models through reinforcement learning. By estimating advantages using group-mean rewards rather than a learned…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Anisha Garg , Claire Zhang , Nishit Neema , David Bick , Ganesh Venkatesh , Joel Hestness

We study inventory control policies for pharmaceutical supply chains, addressing challenges such as perishability, yield uncertainty, and non-stationary demand, combined with batching constraints, lead times, and lost sales. Collaborating…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Francesco Stranieri , Chaaben Kouki , Willem van Jaarsveld , Fabio Stella

Reinforcement learning for large language models faces a fundamental trade-off between sample efficiency and asymptotic performance: strictly on-policy methods discard trajectories after a single update, while off-policy reuse introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Changyu Chen , Xiting Wang , Rui Yan

Reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable, fully cooperative multi-agent settings (Dec-POMDPs) can in principle be used to address many real-world challenges such as controlling a swarm of rescue robots or a team of quadcopters.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Qizhen Zhang , Chris Lu , Animesh Garg , Jakob Foerster

Reinforcement Learning algorithms are primarily focused on learning a policy that maximizes expected return. As a result, the learned policy can exploit one or few reward sources. However, in many natural situations, it is desirable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Sagalpreet Singh , Rishi Saket , Aravindan Raghuveer

Diffusion-based policies have gained growing popularity in solving a wide range of decision-making tasks due to their superior expressiveness and controllable generation during inference. However, effectively training large diffusion…

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) is a popular and empirically successful policy search algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). It iteratively solved the surrogate problem which restricts consecutive policies to be close to each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Sahar Roostaie , Mohammad Mehdi Ebadzadeh

We study the problem of training and fine-tuning expressive policies with online reinforcement learning (RL) given an offline dataset. Training expressive policy classes with online RL present a unique challenge of stable value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Perry Dong , Qiyang Li , Dorsa Sadigh , Chelsea Finn

Reinforcement Learning (RL) from Human Preference-based feedback is a popular paradigm for fine-tuning generative models, which has produced impressive models such as GPT-4 and Claude3 Opus. This framework often consists of two steps:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Jonathan D. Chang , Wenhao Zhan , Owen Oertell , Kianté Brantley , Dipendra Misra , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun

Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Chuheng Zhang , Yuanying Cai , Longbo Huang , Jian Li

In the field of large language models (LLMs), aligning models with the diverse preferences of users is a critical challenge. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has played a key role in this area. It works by using pairs of preferences…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Yueqin Yin , Zhendong Wang , Yi Gu , Hai Huang , Weizhu Chen , Mingyuan Zhou

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants have become increasingly popular for aligning language models with human preferences. These methods aim to teach models to better distinguish between chosen (or preferred) and rejected…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Xiliang Yang , Feng Jiang , Qianen Zhang , Lei Zhao , Xiao Li

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely adopted offline algorithm for preference-based reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), designed to improve training simplicity and stability by redefining reward functions.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Gengxu Li , Tingyu Xia , Yi Chang , Yuan Wu

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), primarily driven by the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm, is a leading approach for enhancing the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Kangqi Ni , Zhen Tan , Zijie Liu , Pingzhi Li , Tianlong Chen

Scaling reinforcement learning to tens of thousands of parallel environments requires overcoming the limited exploration capacity of a single policy. Ensemble-based policy gradient methods, which employ multiple policies to collect diverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Naoki Shitanda , Motoki Omura , Tatsuya Harada , Takayuki Osa

We present Reward-Switching Policy Optimization (RSPO), a paradigm to discover diverse strategies in complex RL environments by iteratively finding novel policies that are both locally optimal and sufficiently different from existing ones.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-04 Zihan Zhou , Wei Fu , Bingliang Zhang , Yi Wu

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has catalyzed a leap in Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, yet its optimization dynamics remain fragile. Standard algorithms like GRPO enforce stability via "hard clipping", which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Xiaoliang Fu , Jiaye Lin , Yangyi Fang , Chaowen Hu , Cong Qin , Zekai Shao , Binbin Zheng , Lu Pan , Ke Zeng

State-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically use random sampling (e.g., $\epsilon$-greedy) for exploration, but this method fails on hard exploration tasks like Montezuma's Revenge. To address the challenge of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Eric Chen , Zhang-Wei Hong , Joni Pajarinen , Pulkit Agrawal