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The reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly, particularly following the release of DeepSeek R1, which has inspired a surge of research into data quality and reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Jian Yao , Ran Cheng , Xingyu Wu , Jibin Wu , Kay Chen Tan

Despite extreme sample inefficiency, on-policy reinforcement learning, aka policy gradients, has become a fundamental tool in decision-making problems. With the recent advances in GPU-driven simulation, the ability to collect large amounts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Jayesh Singla , Ananye Agarwal , Deepak Pathak

Existing approaches for improving generalization in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have mostly focused on representation learning, neglecting RL-specific aspects such as exploration. We hypothesize that the agent's exploration strategy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Yiding Jiang , J. Zico Kolter , Roberta Raileanu

Offline reinforcement learning agents seek optimal policies from fixed data sets. With environmental interaction prohibited, agents face significant challenges in preventing errors in value estimates from compounding and subsequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Alex Beeson , Giovanni Montana

Recent years have witnessed a tremendous improvement of deep reinforcement learning. However, a challenging problem is that an agent may suffer from inefficient exploration, particularly for on-policy methods. Previous exploration methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Ling Pan , Qingpeng Cai , Longbo Huang

Sequence prediction models can be learned from example sequences with a variety of training algorithms. Maximum likelihood learning is simple and efficient, yet can suffer from compounding error at test time. Reinforcement learning such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Bowen Tan , Zhiting Hu , Zichao Yang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Eric Xing

We propose a new family of policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning, which alternate between sampling data through interaction with the environment, and optimizing a "surrogate" objective function using stochastic gradient ascent.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-29 John Schulman , Filip Wolski , Prafulla Dhariwal , Alec Radford , Oleg Klimov

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Minjae Cho , Huy Trong Tran

Although parallelism has been extensively used in reinforcement learning (RL), the quantitative effects of parallel exploration are not well understood theoretically. We study the benefits of simple parallel exploration for reward-free RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Pedro Cisneros-Velarde , Boxiang Lyu , Sanmi Koyejo , Mladen Kolar

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has shown notable effectiveness in enhancing large language models (LLMs) reasoning performance, especially in mathematics tasks. However, such improvements often come with reduced outcome…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Chenyi Li , Yuan Zhang , Bo Wang , Guoqing Ma , Wei Tang , Haoyang Huang , Nan Duan

Policy gradient methods are widely adopted reinforcement learning algorithms for tasks with continuous action spaces. These methods succeeded in many application domains, however, because of their notorious sample inefficiency their use…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-20 Davide Mambelli , Stephan Bongers , Onno Zoeter , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Frans A. Oliehoek

Large Language Models (LLMs) can self-improve through reinforcement learning, where they generate trajectories to explore and discover better solutions. However, this exploration process is computationally expensive, often forcing current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Ziniu Li , Congliang Chen , Tianyun Yang , Tian Ding , Ruoyu Sun , Ge Zhang , Wenhao Huang , Zhi-Quan Luo

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods have achieved state-of-the-art results on a range of multi-agent tasks. Yet, MARL algorithms typically require significantly more environment interactions than their single-agent…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-17 Tom Danino , Nahum Shimkin

We study the problem of exploration in Reinforcement Learning and present a novel model-free solution. We adopt an information-theoretical viewpoint and start from the instance-specific lower bound of the number of samples that have to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

Off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning methods using previously collected data can improve sample efficiency over on-policy policy gradient techniques. On the other hand, on-policy algorithms are often more stable and easier to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-02 Shixiang Gu , Timothy Lillicrap , Zoubin Ghahramani , Richard E. Turner , Bernhard Schölkopf , Sergey Levine

Deep neuroevolution and deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) algorithms are two popular approaches to policy search. The former is widely applicable and rather stable, but suffers from low sample efficiency. By contrast, the latter is more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-12 Aloïs Pourchot , Olivier Sigaud

Recent advancements have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) can substantially improve the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). The effectiveness of such RL training, however, depends critically on the exploration space…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Haoyuan Wu , Hai Wang , Jiajia Wu , Jinxiang Ou , Keyao Wang , Weile Chen , Zihao Zheng , Bei Yu

Multitask Reinforcement Learning (MTRL) approaches have gained increasing attention for its wide applications in many important Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks. However, while recent advancements in MTRL theory have focused on the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-07 Ziping Xu , Zifan Xu , Runxuan Jiang , Peter Stone , Ambuj Tewari

Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning are a successful approach for a variety of reasons: they are model free, they directly optimize the performance metric of interest, and they allow for richly parameterized policies.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-14 Alekh Agarwal , Mikael Henaff , Sham Kakade , Wen Sun