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To accumulate knowledge and improve its policy of behaviour, a reinforcement learning agent can learn `off-policy' about policies that differ from the policy used to generate its experience. This is important to learn counterfactuals, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Simon Schmitt , John Shawe-Taylor , Hado van Hasselt

Alignment is vital for safely deploying large language models (LLMs). Existing techniques are either reward-based (training a reward model on preference pairs and optimizing with reinforcement learning) or reward-free (directly fine-tuning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ruoxi Cheng , Haoxuan Ma , Weixin Wang , Ranjie Duan , Jiexi Liu , Xiaoshuang Jia , Simeng Qin , Xiaochun Cao , Yang Liu , Xiaojun Jia

We develop theory and algorithms for average-reward on-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL). We first consider bounding the difference of the long-term average reward for two policies. We show that previous work based on the discounted return…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Yiming Zhang , Keith W. Ross

Reinforcement learning (RL) is typically concerned with estimating stationary policies or single-step models, leveraging the Markov property to factorize problems in time. However, we can also view RL as a generic sequence modeling problem,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Michael Janner , Qiyang Li , Sergey Levine

We propose reinforcement learning (RL) strategies tailored for reasoning in large language models (LLMs) under strict memory and compute limits, with a particular focus on compatibility with LoRA fine-tuning. Building on early policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Alan Lee , Harry Tong

While off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are sample efficient due to gradient-based updates and data reuse in the replay buffer, they struggle with convergence to local optima due to limited exploration. On the other hand,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Bowen Zheng , Ran Cheng

Recent research highlights the potential of multimodal foundation models in tackling complex decision-making challenges. However, their large parameters make real-world deployment resource-intensive and often impractical for constrained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Donghoon Lee , Tung M. Luu , Younghwan Lee , Chang D. Yoo

This paper demonstrates that continual relearning of control policies using incremental deep reinforcement learning (RL) can improve policy learning for non-stationary processes. We demonstrate this approach for a data-driven 'smart…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-06 Avisek Naug , Marcos Quiñones-Grueiro , Gautam Biswas

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a key paradigm for aligning and optimizing large language models (LLMs). Standard approaches treat the LLM as the policy and apply RL directly over the full vocabulary space. However, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Jing-Cheng Pang , Liang Lu , Xian Tang , Kun Jiang , Sijie Wu , Kai Zhang , Xubin Li

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

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has been a key driver of recent progress in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models, but it is typically trained in a low-staleness, near-on-policy regime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Minghao Tian , Yunfei Xie , Chen Wei

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance on complex reasoning tasks, with reinforcement learning under verifiable rewards (RLVR) emerging as a principled framework for aligning model behavior with reasoning chains.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Yunjian Zhang , Sudong Wang , Yang Li , Peiran Xu , Conghao Zhou , Xiaoyue Ma , Jianing Li , Yao Zhu

We propose Reinforcement Learning with Explicit Human Values (RLEV), a method that aligns Large Language Model (LLM) optimization directly with quantifiable human value signals. While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Dian Yu , Yulai Zhao , Kishan Panaganti , Linfeng Song , Haitao Mi , Dong Yu

This paper introduces Meta-Q-Learning (MQL), a new off-policy algorithm for meta-Reinforcement Learning (meta-RL). MQL builds upon three simple ideas. First, we show that Q-learning is competitive with state-of-the-art meta-RL algorithms if…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Rasool Fakoor , Pratik Chaudhari , Stefano Soatto , Alexander J. Smola

Offline reinforcement learning restricts the learning process to rely only on logged-data without access to an environment. While this enables real-world applications, it also poses unique challenges. One important challenge is dealing with…

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to cater to different human preferences, learning new skills, and unlearning harmful behavior is an important problem. Search-based methods, such as Best-of-N or Monte-Carlo Tree Search, are performant,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Seungwook Han , Idan Shenfeld , Akash Srivastava , Yoon Kim , Pulkit Agrawal

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been effective for post-training autoregressive (AR) language models, but extending these methods to diffusion language models (DLMs) is challenging due to intractable sequence-level likelihoods. Existing…

While Experience Replay - the practice of storing rollouts and reusing them multiple times during training - is a foundational technique in general RL, it remains largely unexplored in LLM post-training due to the prevailing belief that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Charles Arnal , Vivien Cabannes , Taco Cohen , Julia Kempe , Remi Munos

Large Language Model (LLM) based listwise ranking has shown superior performance in many passage ranking tasks. With the development of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), many studies have demonstrated that step-by-step reasoning during…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Wenhan Liu , Xinyu Ma , Weiwei Sun , Yutao Zhu , Yuchen Li , Dawei Yin , Zhicheng Dou

Model-based offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) constructs environment models from offline datasets to perform conservative policy optimization. Existing approaches focus on learning state transitions through ensemble models, rollouting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Hongye Cao , Fan Feng , Jing Huo , Shangdong Yang , Meng Fang , Tianpei Yang , Yang Gao