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Policy-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) has established itself as the dominant paradigm in generative recommendation for optimizing sequential user interactions. However, when applied to offline historical logs, these methods suffer a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Jie Jiang , Yusen Huo , Xiangxin Zhan , Changping Wang , Jun Zhang

On-policy reinforcement learning methods like GRPO suffer from mode collapse: they exhibit reduced solution diversity, concentrating probability mass on a single solution once discovered and ceasing exploration of alternative strategies. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Xiaozhe Li , Yang Li , Xinyu Fang , Shengyuan Ding , Peiji Li , Yongkang Chen , Yichuan Ma , Tianyi Lyu , Linyang Li , Dahua Lin , Qipeng Guo , Qingwen Liu , Kai Chen

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown extraordinary potential in aligning diffusion models to downstream tasks, yet most of them still suffer from significant reward hacking, which degrades generative diversity and quality by inducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Jiaming Li , Chenyu Zhu , Nanxi Yi , Youjun Bao , Li Sun , Quanying Lv , Xiang Fang , Daizong Liu , Jianjun Li , Kun He , Bowen Zhou , Zhiyuan Ma

This tutorial provides a comprehensive survey of methods for fine-tuning diffusion models to optimize downstream reward functions. While diffusion models are widely known to provide excellent generative modeling capability, practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-19 Masatoshi Uehara , Yulai Zhao , Tommaso Biancalani , Sergey Levine

Diffusion models have been successfully applied in areas such as image, video, and audio generation. Recent works show their promise for sequential decision-making and dexterous manipulation, leveraging their ability to model complex action…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Maria Makarova , Qian Liu , Dzmitry Tsetserukou

Recent Progress in post-training flow matching for text-to-image (T2I) generation with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has demonstrated strong potential. However, it is hindered by a critical limitation: inaccurate advantage…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Yifu Luo , Haoyuan Sun , Xinhao Hu , Penghui Du , Keyu Fan , Bo Li , Sinan Du , Xu Wan , Zhiyu Chen , Bo Xia , Tiantian Zhang , Yongzhe Chang , Changqian Yu , Kun Gai , Xueqian Wang

At the core of reinforcement learning is the idea of learning beyond the performance in the data. However, scaling such systems has proven notoriously tricky. In contrast, techniques from generative modeling have proven remarkably scalable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Kevin Frans , Seohong Park , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) can be effectively supported at scale through the use of world models. However, in practice, scaling such approaches remains fundamentally limited. A commonly recognized challenge is model bias and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Xiaoyuan Cheng , Wenxuan Yuan , Zhancun Mu , Yuanzhao Zhang , Yiming Yang , Hai Wang , Zhuo Sun , Che Liu

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is widely used in continuous control due to its robustness and stable training, yet it remains sample-inefficient in tasks with expensive interactions and high-dimensional action spaces. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Tianci Gao , Konstantin A. Neusypin , Dmitry D. Dmitriev , Bo Yang , Shengren Rao

Online reinforcement learning (RL) has been central to post-training language models, but its extension to diffusion models remains challenging due to intractable likelihoods. Recent works discretize the reverse sampling process to enable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Kaiwen Zheng , Huayu Chen , Haotian Ye , Haoxiang Wang , Qinsheng Zhang , Kai Jiang , Hang Su , Stefano Ermon , Jun Zhu , Ming-Yu Liu

Conditional decision generation with diffusion models has shown powerful competitiveness in reinforcement learning (RL). Recent studies reveal the relation between energy-function-guidance diffusion models and constrained RL problems. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Jifeng Hu , Sili Huang , Zhejian Yang , Shengchao Hu , Li Shen , Hechang Chen , Lichao Sun , Yi Chang , Dacheng Tao

Diffusion policies have achieved superior performance in imitation learning and offline reinforcement learning (RL) due to their rich expressiveness. However, the conventional diffusion training procedure requires samples from target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Haitong Ma , Tianyi Chen , Kai Wang , Na Li , Bo Dai

The Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm with a Gaussian policy has become a mainstream implementation for realizing the Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt RL) objective, which incorporates entropy maximization to encourage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Xiaoyi Dong , Jian Cheng , Xi Sheryl Zhang

Learning diverse policies for non-prehensile manipulation is essential for improving skill transfer and generalization to out-of-distribution scenarios. In this work, we enhance exploration through a two-fold approach within a hybrid…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Huy Le , Tai Hoang , Miroslav Gabriel , Gerhard Neumann , Ngo Anh Vien

Reinforcement learning (RL) struggles to scale to large, combinatorial action spaces common in many real-world problems. This paper introduces a novel framework for training discrete diffusion models as highly effective policies in these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Haitong Ma , Ofir Nabati , Aviv Rosenberg , Bo Dai , Oran Lang , Craig Boutilier , Na Li , Shie Mannor , Lior Shani , Guy Tenneholtz

Reinforcement learning is crucial for aligning large language models to perform complex reasoning tasks. However, current algorithms such as Group Relative Policy Optimization suffer from coarse grained, sequence level credit assignment,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Hongbo Jin , Rongpeng Zhu , Zhongjing Du , Xu Jiang , Jingqi Tian , Qiaoman Zhang , Jiayu Ding

Online reinforcement learning is becoming increasingly important for aligning diffusion models with non-differentiable objectives. However, existing methods still face limitations in assigning fine-grained credit along denoising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zhengyang Liang , Qihang Zhang , Ceyuan Yang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective in addressing complex control and decision-making tasks. However, in most traditional RL algorithms, the policy is typically parameterized as a diagonal Gaussian distribution, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Ruijie Hao , Longfei Zhang , Yang Dai , Yang Ma , Xingxing Liang , Guangquan Cheng

Direct preference optimization (DPO) methods have shown strong potential in aligning text-to-image diffusion models with human preferences by training on paired comparisons. These methods improve training stability by avoiding the REINFORCE…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Yi-Lun Wu , Bo-Kai Ruan , Chiang Tseng , Hong-Han Shuai

Flow-based generative models, including diffusion models, excel at modeling continuous distributions in high-dimensional spaces. In this work, we introduce Flow Policy Optimization (FPO), a simple on-policy reinforcement learning algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-04 David McAllister , Songwei Ge , Brent Yi , Chung Min Kim , Ethan Weber , Hongsuk Choi , Haiwen Feng , Angjoo Kanazawa