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Two hitherto disconnected threads of research, diverse exploration (DE) and maximum entropy RL have addressed a wide range of problems facing reinforcement learning algorithms via ostensibly distinct mechanisms. In this work, we identify a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Andrew Cohen , Lei Yu , Xingye Qiao , Xiangrong Tong

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful method for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Outcome-based RL, which rewards policies solely for the correctness of the final answer, yields substantial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Yuda Song , Julia Kempe , Remi Munos

We consider a team of reinforcement learning agents that concurrently operate in a common environment, and we develop an approach to efficient coordinated exploration that is suitable for problems of practical scale. Our approach builds on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-18 Maria Dimakopoulou , Ian Osband , Benjamin Van Roy

We address the challenge of effective exploration while maintaining good performance in policy gradient methods. As a solution, we propose diverse exploration (DE) via conjugate policies. DE learns and deploys a set of conjugate policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-12 Andrew Cohen , Xingye Qiao , Lei Yu , Elliot Way , Xiangrong Tong

Exploration is a key challenge in Reinforcement Learning, especially in long-horizon, deceptive and sparse-reward environments. For such applications, population-based approaches have proven effective. Methods such as Quality-Diversity…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-11-24 Bryan Lim , Manon Flageat , Antoine Cully

While Reinforcement Learning can achieve impressive results for complex tasks, the learned policies are generally prone to fail in downstream tasks with even minor model mismatch or unexpected perturbations. Recent works have demonstrated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Kang Xu , Yan Ma , Bingsheng Wei , Wei Li

Batch reinforcement learning enables policy learning without direct interaction with the environment during training, relying exclusively on previously collected sets of interactions. This approach is, therefore, well-suited for high-risk…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Amna Najib , Stefan Depeweg , Phillip Swazinna

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are widely used for their strong asymptotic performance and training stability, but they struggle to scale with larger batch sizes, as additional parallel environments yield redundant data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Jianren Wang , Yifan Su , Abhinav Gupta , Deepak Pathak

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

In this effort, we consider the impact of regularization on the diversity of actions taken by policies generated from reinforcement learning agents trained using a policy gradient. Policy gradient agents are prone to entropy collapse, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Andrew Starnes , Anton Dereventsov , Clayton Webster

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

Policy optimization methods are popular reinforcement learning algorithms, because their incremental and on-policy nature makes them more stable than the value-based counterparts. However, the same properties also make them slow to converge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Andrea Zanette , Ching-An Cheng , Alekh Agarwal

Among the great successes of Reinforcement Learning (RL), self-play algorithms play an essential role in solving competitive games. Current self-play algorithms optimize the agent to maximize expected win-rates against its current or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Yuhua Jiang , Qihan Liu , Xiaoteng Ma , Chenghao Li , Yiqin Yang , Jun Yang , Bin Liang , Qianchuan Zhao

Leveraging planning during learning and decision-making is central to the long-term development of intelligent agents. Recent works have successfully combined tree-based search methods and self-play learning mechanisms to this end. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Matthew V Macfarlane , Edan Toledo , Donal Byrne , Paul Duckworth , Alexandre Laterre

To unbiasedly evaluate multiple target policies, the dominant approach among RL practitioners is to run and evaluate each target policy separately. However, this evaluation method is far from efficient because samples are not shared across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Shuze Daniel Liu , Claire Chen , Shangtong Zhang

Being able to solve a task in diverse ways makes agents more robust to task variations and less prone to local optima. In this context, constrained diversity optimization has become a useful reinforcement learning (RL) framework for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Cornelius V. Braun , Sayantan Auddy , Marc Toussaint

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Kaixiang Lin , Jiayu Zhou

We study the problem of efficiently estimating policies that simultaneously optimize multiple objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). Given $n$ objectives (or tasks), we seek the optimal partition of these objectives into $k \ll n$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Zhenshuo Zhang , Minxuan Duan , Youran Ye , Hongyang R. Zhang

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