Related papers: Not All Transitions Matter: Evidence from PPO
Dropout has long been a staple of supervised learning, but is rarely used in reinforcement learning. We analyze why naive application of dropout is problematic for policy-gradient learning algorithms and introduce consistent dropout, a…
Problem definition: Supply chains are constantly evolving networks. Reinforcement learning is increasingly proposed as a solution to provide optimal control of these networks. Academic/practical: However, learning in continuously varying…
Mode-dependent architectural components (layers that behave differently during training and evaluation, such as Batch Normalization or dropout) are commonly used in visual reinforcement learning but can destabilize on-policy optimization.…
Traditional RL algorithms like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) typically train on the entire rollout buffer, operating under the assumption that all generated episodes provide a beneficial optimization signal. However, these episodes…
Score-function based methods for policy learning, such as REINFORCE and PPO, have delivered strong results in game-playing and robotics, yet their high variance often undermines training stability. Using pathwise policy gradients, i.e.…
Plateaus, where an agent's performance stagnates at a suboptimal level, are a common problem in deep on-policy RL. Focusing on PPO due to its widespread adoption, we show that plateaus in certain regimes arise not because of known…
Reinforcement learning is structurally harder than supervised learning because the policy changes the data distribution it learns from. The resulting fragility is especially visible in large-model training, where the training and rollout…
Reinforcement learning has become a central paradigm for improving LLM reasoning. However, existing methods use a single policy to produce both inference responses and training optimization trajectories. The objective conflict between…
Group-relative RL training (GRPO) samples a small group of parallel rollouts for every training prompt and uses their within-group reward spread to compute per-trajectory advantages. In agentic environments each rollout is a long multi-turn…
Reinforcement learning has been central to recent advances in large language model reasoning, but most algorithms rely on on-policy training that demands fresh rollouts at every update, limiting efficiency and scalability. Asynchronous RL…
Offline reinforcement learning methods hold the promise of learning policies from pre-collected datasets without the need to query the environment for new transitions. This setting is particularly well-suited for continuous control robotic…
Experience replay is one of the most commonly used approaches to improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning algorithms. In this work, we propose an approach to select and replay sequences of transitions in order to accelerate…
In reinforcement learning (RL) with experience replay, experiences stored in a replay buffer influence the RL agent's performance. Information about how these experiences influence the agent's performance is valuable for various purposes,…
Offline Reinforcement Learning (ORL) offers a robust solution to training agents in applications where interactions with the environment must be strictly limited due to cost, safety, or lack of accurate simulation environments. Despite its…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) looks at learning how to optimally solve tasks using a fixed dataset of interactions from the environment. Many off-policy algorithms developed for online learning struggle in the offline setting as they…
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…
Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) reinforcement learning is a powerful learning paradigm which seeks to maximize return under entropy regularization. However, action entropy does not necessarily coincide with state entropy, e.g., when multiple…
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…
We propose a simple, practical, and intuitive approach for domain adaptation in reinforcement learning. Our approach stems from the idea that the agent's experience in the source domain should look similar to its experience in the target…
Oftentimes, environments for sequential decision-making problems can be quite sparse in the provision of evaluative feedback to guide reinforcement-learning agents. In the extreme case, long trajectories of behavior are merely punctuated…