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We uncover a surprising phenomenon in deep reinforcement learning: training a diverse ensemble of data-sharing agents -- a well-established exploration strategy -- can significantly impair the performance of the individual ensemble members…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Zhixuan Lin , Pierluca D'Oro , Evgenii Nikishin , Aaron Courville

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

Recent advancements in agentic test-time scaling allow models to gather environmental feedback before committing to final actions. A key limitation of existing methods is that they typically employ undifferentiated exploration strategies,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Xingyuan Hua , Sheng Yue , Ju Ren

A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-21 Paulo Rauber , Avinash Ummadisingu , Filipe Mutz , Juergen Schmidhuber

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

A policy in deep reinforcement learning (RL), either deterministic or stochastic, is commonly parameterized as a Gaussian distribution alone, limiting the learned behavior to be unimodal. However, the nature of many practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 SM Mazharul Islam , Manfred Huber

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models (LLMs). Current RLVR methods often overemphasize exploitation, leading to entropy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Liang Chen , Xueting Han , Qizhou Wang , Bo Han , Jing Bai , Hinrich Schutze , Kam-Fai Wong

This paper considers the problem of learning safe policies in the context of reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, we consider the notion of probabilistic safety. This is, we aim to design policies that maintain the state of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Weiqin Chen , Dharmashankar Subramanian , Santiago Paternain

In complex reinforcement learning (RL) problems, policies with similar rewards may have substantially different behaviors. It remains a fundamental challenge to optimize rewards while also discovering as many diverse strategies as possible,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Wei Fu , Weihua Du , Jingwei Li , Sunli Chen , Jingzhao Zhang , Yi Wu

Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Shuze Daniel Liu , Claire Chen , Shangtong Zhang

With reinforcement learning, an agent could learn complex behaviors from high-level abstractions of the task. However, exploration and reward shaping remained challenging for existing methods, especially in scenarios where the extrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Jie Chen , Wenjun Xu

Policy exploration is critical in reinforcement learning (RL), where existing approaches include greedy, Gaussian process, etc. However, these approaches utilize preset stochastic processes and are indiscriminately applied in all kinds of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Qianyue Hao , Yiwen Song , Qingmin Liao , Jian Yuan , Yong Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy by interaction with an environment. Consequently, learning complex behavior requires a vast number of samples, which can be prohibitive in practice. Nevertheless, instead of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Sarah Müller , Alexander von Rohr , Sebastian Trimpe

Policy optimization methods have shown great promise in solving complex reinforcement and imitation learning tasks. While model-free methods are broadly applicable, they often require many samples to optimize complex policies. Model-based…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-23 Daniel Levy , Stefano Ermon

Reinforcement learning fine-tuning (RLFT) is a dominant paradigm for improving pretrained policies for downstream tasks. These pretrained policies, trained on large datasets, produce generations with a broad range of promising but unrefined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jubayer Ibn Hamid , Ifdita Hasan Orney , Ellen Xu , Chelsea Finn , Dorsa Sadigh

The combination of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with ensemble methods has been proved to be highly effective in addressing complex sequential decision-making problems. This success can be primarily attributed to the utilization of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Chao Li , Chen Gong , Qiang He , Xinwen Hou

Recent works have proven that intricate cooperative behaviors can emerge in agents trained using meta reinforcement learning on open ended task distributions using self-play. While the results are impressive, we argue that self-play and…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Richard Bornemann , Gautier Hamon , Eleni Nisioti , Clément Moulin-Frier

We study reinforcement learning in hybrid discrete-continuous action spaces, such as settings where the discrete component selects a regime (or index) and the continuous component optimizes within it -- a structure common in robotics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Matias Alvo , Daniel Russo , Yash Kanoria

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm is a deep reinforcement learning algorithm with outstanding performance, especially in continuous control tasks. But the performance of this method is still affected by its exploration ability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Junwei Zhang , Zhenghao Zhang , Shuai Han , Shuai Lü

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