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Reinforcement learning, such as PPO and GRPO, has powered recent breakthroughs in LLM reasoning. Scaling rollout to sample more prompts enables models to selectively use higher-quality data for training, which can stabilize RL training and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Haizhong Zheng , Yang Zhou , Brian R. Bartoldson , Bhavya Kailkhura , Fan Lai , Jiawei Zhao , Beidi Chen

In recent years, on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to many different continuous control tasks. While RL algorithms are often conceptually simple, their state-of-the-art implementations take numerous low-…

Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is typically enforced through objective shaping while keeping environment dynamics stationary with respect to observable state-action pairs. Under delayed harm, this can lead to replay: after a washout…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Prakul Sunil Hiremath

Large language model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance their ability to interact with external environments through tool use, particularly in search-based settings that require…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Guoqing Wang , Sunhao Dai , Guangze Ye , Zeyu Gan , Wei Yao , Yong Deng , Xiaofeng Wu , Zhenzhe Ying

The performance of reinforcement learning depends upon designing an appropriate action space, where the effect of each action is measurable, yet, granular enough to permit flexible behavior. So far, this process involved non-trivial user…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Edoardo Cetin , Oya Celiktutan

Hierarchical reinforcement learning is a promising approach to tackle long-horizon decision-making problems with sparse rewards. Unfortunately, most methods still decouple the lower-level skill acquisition process and the training of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-15 Alexander C. Li , Carlos Florensa , Ignasi Clavera , Pieter Abbeel

In many real-world scenarios, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are trained on data with dynamics shift, i.e., with different underlying environment dynamics. A majority of current methods address such issue by training context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Zhenghai Xue , Qingpeng Cai , Shuchang Liu , Dong Zheng , Peng Jiang , Kun Gai , Bo An

Traditional on-policy Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) frameworks suffer from experience waste and reward homogeneity, which directly hinders learning efficiency on difficult samples during large language models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Xu Wan , Yansheng Wang , Wenqi Huang , Mingyang Sun

Recently regular decision processes have been proposed as a well-behaved form of non-Markov decision process. Regular decision processes are characterised by a transition function and a reward function that depend on the whole history,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-05-19 Alessandro Ronca , Giuseppe De Giacomo

Interacting with the actual environment to acquire data is often costly and time-consuming in robotic tasks. Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a feasible solution. On the one hand, it eliminates the requirements of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Pengqin Wang , Meixin Zhu , Shaojie Shen

Rewards and punishments in different forms are pervasive and present in a wide variety of decision-making scenarios. By observing the outcome of a sufficient number of repeated trials, one would gradually learn the value and usefulness of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Nikki Lijing Kuang , Clement H. C. Leung

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically rely on the assumption that the environment dynamics and value function can be expressed in terms of a Markovian state representation. However, when state information is only partially observable,…

In batch reinforcement learning (RL), one often constrains a learned policy to be close to the behavior (data-generating) policy, e.g., by constraining the learned action distribution to differ from the behavior policy by some maximum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-31 Sungryull Sohn , Yinlam Chow , Jayden Ooi , Ofir Nachum , Honglak Lee , Ed Chi , Craig Boutilier

Reinforcement Learning (RL) can effectively learn complex policies. However, learning these policies often demands extensive trial-and-error interactions with the environment. In many real-world scenarios, this approach is not practical due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-19 Linh Le Pham Van , Hung The Tran , Sunil Gupta

This paper deals with distributed policy optimization in reinforcement learning, which involves a central controller and a group of learners. In particular, two typical settings encountered in several applications are considered:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Tianyi Chen , Kaiqing Zhang , Georgios B. Giannakis , Tamer Başar

Experience replay is crucial for off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) methods. By remembering and reusing the experiences from past different policies, experience replay significantly improves the training efficiency and stability of RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Yongsheng Mei , Hanhan Zhou , Tian Lan , Guru Venkataramani , Peng Wei

We study a common challenge in reinforcement learning for large language models (LLMs): the Zero-Reward Assumption, where non-terminal actions (i.e., intermediate token generations) receive zero task-specific immediate reward, while only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Shenghua He , Tian Xia , Xuan Zhou , Hui Wei

Much of the recent success of deep reinforcement learning has been driven by regularized policy optimization (RPO) algorithms with strong performance across multiple domains. In this family of methods, agents are trained to maximize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-24 Ted Moskovitz , Michael Arbel , Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano

Reinforcement learning (RL) -- finding the optimal behaviour (also referred to as policy) maximizing the collected long-term cumulative reward -- is among the most influential approaches in machine learning with a large number of successful…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-28 Tao Ma , Xuzhi Yang , Zoltan Szabo

Although in recent years reinforcement learning has become very popular the number of successful applications to different kinds of operations research problems is rather scarce. Reinforcement learning is based on the well-studied dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-03 Manuel Schneckenreither