The paper introduces Local Updates, Global Learning (LUGL), a framework that separates data collection from model training, allowing non‑incremental learners such as gradient‑boosted trees (LightGBM) to be used in reinforcement learning for games. LUGL alternates between a local phase—where self‑play generates tabular updates—and a global phase—where these updates train a function approximator before resetting the table. Experiments on both perfect‑information and imperfect‑information games show that LightGBM agents perform competitively or better than neural‑network baselines like DQN and DeepCFR.
arXiv:2607. 06854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning agents for imperfect-information card games are only as strong as the opponents they train against, and they are hard to grade, since they beat a random opponent over 99 percent of the time and only tie copies of themselves.
By Nima Kelidari, Mohammadsaeed Haghi, Mahdi Salmani
arXiv:2607. 14171v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning has emerged as the dominant paradigm for training large language model (LLM) agents that interact with executable sandboxes.
By Bowei He, Yankai Chen, Xiaokun Zhang, Xue Liu
arXiv:2609.09094v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Combining search with function approximation has driven major advances in game-playing programs, making self-play algorithms more competitive than ever...
By Raphael Boige, Amine Boumaza, Bruno Scherrer
arXiv:2506. 13862v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In Reinforcement Learning (RL), regularization with a Kullback-Leibler divergence that penalizes large deviations between successive policies has emerged as a popular tool both in theory and practice.
By Alex Davey, Alena Shilova, Brahim Driss, Riad Akrour
arXiv:2609.00892v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Rubric-based reinforcement learning decomposes open-ended instructions into prompt-specific, flexible rubrics, making it better suited than reinforceme...
By Siyuan Li, Xinxin Song, Chen Ruinian, Jingjing Fan, Tingxiong Xiao, Yangen Hu, Ke Zeng, Jinli Suo
arXiv:2607. 01498v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the problem of learning useful policy representations (embeddings) in two-player zero-sum imperfect-information games.
By Kevin Wang, Kevin Yang, Arjun Prakash, Amy Greenwald
arXiv:2602. 00781v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online reinforcement learning in non-episodic, finite-horizon MDPs remains underexplored and is challenged by the need to estimate returns to a fixed terminal time.
By Jiamin Xu, Kyra Gan
arXiv:2607. 23333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We revisit the regret loss framework introduced in Park et al.
By Chanwoo Park, Asuman Ozdaglar
arXiv:2606. 27369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for training LLMs typically rely on ground-truth answers to assign rewards, limiting their applicability to tasks where the ground-truth solution is unknown.
By Yingyu Lin, Qiyue Gao, Nikki Lijing Kuang, Xunpeng Huang, Kun Zhou, Tongtong Liang, Zhewei Yao, Yi-An Ma, Yuxiong He
The paper explores a runtime strategy-selection framework where a large language model (LLM) guides a pre‑trained reinforcement learning (RL) policy for non‑player characters (NPCs) in a Unity combat game without altering the underlying policy. Five NPC agents sharing a PPO policy were compared in a baseline setup and an LLM‑augmented setup, where a locally hosted Mistral 7B model assigns one of four tactical tags every five seconds based on live game state. Across 600 episodes against three scripted opponents, the LLM‑augmented agents more than doubled their win rate against a Balanced opponent, improved performance against an Evasive opponent, but struggled against an Aggressive opponent due to over‑reliance on encirclement; analysis of 2,430 strategy selections revealed limited zero‑shot differentiation with the model favoring Surround in 83.8% of cases.
By Hrithika Deepu Nair, Kayvan Karim
arXiv:2607. 16097v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become central to improving large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks, yet RL post-training is largely studied in isolation from the pretraining that precedes it.
By Jingyan Shen, Ang Li, Salman Rahman, Yifan Sun, Micah Goldblum, Matus Telgarsky, Pavel Izmailov