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In this paper, we propose a multi-timescale replay (MTR) buffer for improving continual learning in RL agents faced with environments that are changing continuously over time at timescales that are unknown to the agent. The basic MTR buffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-17 Christos Kaplanis , Claudia Clopath , Murray Shanahan

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) requires a large number of trials to learn a good policy, especially in environments with sparse rewards. We explore a method to improve the sample efficiency when we have access to demonstrations. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Cinjon Resnick , Roberta Raileanu , Sanyam Kapoor , Alexander Peysakhovich , Kyunghyun Cho , Joan Bruna

Aligning large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific data remains a fundamental challenge. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) offers a straightforward way to inject domain knowledge but often degrades the model's generality. In contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Linxuan Xia , Xiaolong Yang , Yongyuan Chen , Enyue Zhao , Deng Cai , Yasheng Wang , Boxi Wu

Training agents via off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) requires a large memory, named replay memory, that stores past experiences used for learning. These experiences are sampled, uniformly or non-uniformly, to create the batches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-27 Bumgeun Park , Taeyoung Kim , Woohyeon Moon , Luiz Felipe Vecchietti , Dongsoo Har

Continual learning seeks to enable deep learners to train on a series of tasks of unknown length without suffering from the catastrophic forgetting of previous tasks. One effective solution is replay, which involves storing few previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-04 Daniel Brignac , Niels Lobo , Abhijit Mahalanobis

Reinforcement learning (RL) policies are typically trained for fixed objectives, making reuse difficult when task requirements change. We study inference-time policy reuse: given a library of pre-trained policies and a new composite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Ihor Vitenko , Noha Ibrahim , Sihem Amer-Yahia

Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently use on-policy algorithms, such as PPO or GRPO. However, policy lag from distributed training architectures and differences between the training and inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Daniel Ritter , Owen Oertell , Bradley Guo , Jonathan Chang , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training tool for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). In these systems, the rollout, the trajectory sampled from a prompt to termination, including…

Process rewards have been widely used in deep reinforcement learning to improve training efficiency, reduce variance, and prevent reward hacking. In LLM reasoning, existing works also explore various solutions for learning effective process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Xian Wu , Kaijie Zhu , Ying Zhang , Lun Wang , Wenbo Guo

This paper proposes a novel formulation for reinforcement learning (RL) with large language models, explaining why and under what conditions the true sequence-level reward can be optimized via a surrogate token-level objective in policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Chujie Zheng , Kai Dang , Bowen Yu , Mingze Li , Huiqiang Jiang , Junrong Lin , Yuqiong Liu , Hao Lin , Chencan Wu , Feng Hu , An Yang , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

Experience replay enables off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) agents to utilize past experiences to maximize the cumulative reward. Prioritized experience replay that weighs experiences by the magnitude of their temporal-difference error…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Ang A. Li , Zongqing Lu , Chenglin Miao

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

Replay strategies are Continual Learning techniques which mitigate catastrophic forgetting by keeping a buffer of patterns from previous experiences, which are interleaved with new data during training. The amount of patterns stored in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Andrea Rosasco , Antonio Carta , Andrea Cossu , Vincenzo Lomonaco , Davide Bacciu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Lianghuan Huang , Sagnik Anupam , Insup Lee , Shuo Li , Osbert Bastani

Given the inherent non-stationarity prevalent in real-world applications, continual Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to equip the agent with the capability to address a series of sequentially presented decision-making tasks. Within this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Feng Chen , Fuguang Han , Cong Guan , Lei Yuan , Zhilong Zhang , Yang Yu , Zongzhang Zhang

One of the key behavioral characteristics used in neuroscience to determine whether the subject of study -- be it a rodent or a human -- exhibits model-based learning is effective adaptation to local changes in the environment, a particular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Ali Rahimi-Kalahroudi , Janarthanan Rajendran , Ida Momennejad , Harm van Seijen , Sarath Chandar

Artificial neural networks are promising for general function approximation but challenging to train on non-independent or non-identically distributed data due to catastrophic forgetting. The experience replay buffer, a standard component…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-12 Qingfeng Lan , Yangchen Pan , Jun Luo , A. Rupam Mahmood

Continual Learning (CL) aims at incrementally learning new tasks without forgetting the knowledge acquired from old ones. Experience Replay (ER) is a simple and effective rehearsal-based strategy, which optimizes the model with current…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Tao Zhuo , Zhiyong Cheng , Zan Gao , Hehe Fan , Mohan Kankanhalli

Since the introduction of the GRPO algorithm, reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted increasing attention for LLM post-training, yet training efficiency remains a critical challenge. In mainstream RL frameworks, inference and training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jian Lu

Nowadays transformer-based Large Language Models (LLM) for code generation tasks usually apply sampling and filtering pipelines. Due to the sparse reward problem in code generation tasks caused by one-token incorrectness, transformer-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Yuyang Chen , Kaiyan Zhao , Yiming Wang , Ming Yang , Jian Zhang , Xiaoguang Niu