Related papers: SNAPO: Smooth Neural Adjoint Policy Optimization f…
Reinforcement learning (RL) plays an increasingly important role in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet stable and performant policy optimization remains challenging. Token-level importance ratios often…
Recent advances in GPU-based parallel simulation have enabled practitioners to collect large amounts of data and train complex control policies using deep reinforcement learning (RL), on commodity GPUs. However, such successes for RL in…
Deep reinforcement learning algorithms can perform poorly in real-world tasks due to the discrepancy between source and target environments. This discrepancy is commonly viewed as the disturbance in transition dynamics. Many existing…
Safety-critical learning requires policies that improve performance without leaving the safe operating regime. We study constrained policy learning where model parameters must satisfy rollout-based safety constraints that can be evaluated…
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,…
We propose a new sample-efficient methodology, called Supervised Policy Update (SPU), for deep reinforcement learning. Starting with data generated by the current policy, SPU formulates and solves a constrained optimization problem in the…
Dynamic optimization is currently limited by sensitivity computations that require information from full forward and adjoint wave fields. Since the forward and adjoint solutions are computed in opposing time directions, the forward solution…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) excels in various control tasks, yet the absence of safety guarantees hampers its real-world applicability. In particular, explorations during learning usually results in safety violations, while the RL…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for post-training large language models. While Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely adopted, its coarse credit assignment uniformly…
Problem Definition: Managing inpatient flow in large hospital systems is challenging due to the complexity of assigning randomly arriving patients -- either waiting for primary units or being overflowed to alternative units. Current…
We study continuous action reinforcement learning problems in which it is crucial that the agent interacts with the environment only through safe policies, i.e.,~policies that do not take the agent to undesirable situations. We formulate…
Post-training paradigms for Large Language Models (LLMs), primarily Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), face a fundamental dilemma: SFT provides stability (low variance) but suffers from high fitting bias, while RL…
Proximal policy optimization (PPO) has yielded state-of-the-art results in policy search, a subfield of reinforcement learning, with one of its key points being the use of a surrogate objective function to restrict the step size at each…
In safe reinforcement learning (SRL) problems, an agent explores the environment to maximize an expected total reward and meanwhile avoids violation of certain constraints on a number of expected total costs. In general, such SRL problems…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) dominates reinforcement learning and LLM alignment but relies on a "hard clipping" mechanism that discards valuable gradients. Conversely, unconstrained methods like SPO expose the optimization to…
We propose a successive convex approximation based off-policy optimization (SCAOPO) algorithm to solve the general constrained reinforcement learning problem, which is formulated as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) in the…
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) promise energy-efficient computation by mimicking biological neural dynamics, yet existing plasticity rules focus on isolated spike pairs and fail to leverage the synchronous activity patterns that drive…
Diffusion policies, widely adopted in decision-making scenarios such as robotics, gaming and autonomous driving, are capable of learning diverse skills from demonstration data due to their high representation power. However, the sub-optimal…
We present Memory Augmented Policy Optimization (MAPO), a simple and novel way to leverage a memory buffer of promising trajectories to reduce the variance of policy gradient estimate. MAPO is applicable to deterministic environments with…
Instability and slowness are two main problems in deep reinforcement learning. Even if proximal policy optimization (PPO) is the state of the art, it still suffers from these two problems. We introduce an improved algorithm based on…