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Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and intentions is crucial for their utility, honesty, and safety. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a popular approach to achieve this alignment, but it faces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Junkang Wu , Xue Wang , Zhengyi Yang , Jiancan Wu , Jinyang Gao , Bolin Ding , Xiang Wang , Xiangnan He

Model-based reinforcement learning methods learn a dynamics model with real data sampled from the environment and leverage it to generate simulated data to derive an agent. However, due to the potential distribution mismatch between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Jian Shen , Han Zhao , Weinan Zhang , Yong Yu

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

Novel advanced policy gradient (APG) methods, such as Trust Region policy optimization and Proximal policy optimization (PPO), have become the dominant reinforcement learning algorithms because of their ease of implementation and good…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-22 J. G. Dai , Mark Gluzman

We propose a general framework for entropy-regularized average-reward reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our approach is based on extending the linear-programming formulation of policy optimization in MDPs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-23 Gergely Neu , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez

Developing a universal and versatile embodied intelligence system presents two primary challenges: the critical embodied data bottleneck, where real-world data is scarce and expensive, and the algorithmic inefficiency of existing methods,…

While reinforcement learning methods such as Group Relative Preference Optimization (GRPO) have significantly enhanced Large Language Models, adapting them to diffusion models remains challenging. In particular, GRPO demands a stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yihong Luo , Tianyang Hu , Jing Tang

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is a widely-used algorithm for on-policy reinforcement learning. This work offers an alternative perspective of PPO, in which it is decomposed into the inner-loop estimation of update vectors, and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Charlie B. Tan , Edan Toledo , Benjamin Ellis , Jakob N. Foerster , Ferenc Huszár

This paper provides new conditions for dynamic optimality in discrete time and uses them to establish fundamental dynamic programming results for several commonly used recursive preference specifications. These include Epstein-Zin…

General Economics · Economics 2020-06-23 Guanlong Ren , John Stachurski

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

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is among the most widely used deep reinforcement learning algorithms, yet its theoretical foundations remain incomplete. Most importantly, convergence and understanding of fundamental PPO advantages remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Leif Doering , Daniel Schmidt , Moritz Melcher , Sebastian Kassing , Benedikt Wille , Tilman Aach , Simon Weissmann

Large language models (LLMs) trained with reinforcement objectives often achieve superficially correct answers via shortcut strategies, pairing correct outputs with spurious or unfaithful reasoning and degrading under small causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xiangqi Wang , Yue Huang , Yujun Zhou , Xiaonan Luo , Kehan Guo , Xiangliang Zhang

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used RL-free method for aligning language models from pairwise preferences, but it models preferences over full sequences even though generation is driven by per-token decisions. Existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Truong Nguyen , Tien-Phat Nguyen , Linh Ngo Van , Duy Minh Ho Nguyen , Khoa D. Doan , Trung Le

We introduce Direct Value Optimization (DVO), an innovative reinforcement learning framework for enhancing large language models in complex reasoning tasks. Unlike traditional methods relying on preference labels, DVO utilizes value signals…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Hongbo Zhang , Han Cui , Guangsheng Bao , Linyi Yang , Jun Wang , Yue Zhang

In this paper, we implement three state-of-art continuous reinforcement learning algorithms, Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Policy Gradient (PG)in portfolio management. All of them are…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2018-11-20 Zhipeng Liang , Hao Chen , Junhao Zhu , Kangkang Jiang , Yanran Li

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is an effective method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, reward over-optimization remains an open challenge leading to discrepancies between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Juntao Dai , Taiye Chen , Yaodong Yang , Qian Zheng , Gang Pan

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is among the most widely used algorithms in reinforcement learning, which achieves state-of-the-art performance in many challenging problems. The keys to its success are the reliable policy updates through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-02 Mónika Farsang , Luca Szegletes

The generated responses of large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned to human preferences through a process called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). As RLHF relies on a challenging training sequence, whereby a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Xiangkun Hu , Lemin Kong , Tong He , David Wipf

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is increasingly viewed as a tree pruning mechanism. However, we identify a systemic pathology termed Recursive Space Contraction (RSC), an irreversible collapse driven by the combined…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Tianyi Wang , Long Li , Hongcan Guo , Yibiao Chen , Yixia Li , Yong Wang , Yun Chen , Guanhua Chen

The exploration-exploitation (EE) trade-off is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs). With Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), training tends to be exploitation driven: entropy decreases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Zhaochun Li , Chen Wang , Jionghao Bai , Shisheng Cui , Ge Lan , Zhou Zhao , Yue Wang