arXiv:2602. 05379v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Effective reinforcement learning (RL) for complex stochastic systems requires leveraging historical data to improve sample efficiency and accelerate policy optimization.
By Hua Zheng, Wei Xie, M. Ben Feng, Keilung Choy
The paper investigates a natural gradient method based on the Fisher information matrix of state-action distributions, which follows a Fisher‑Rao gradient flow within the state-action polytope under a linear potential. It establishes linear convergence rates for Fisher‑Rao gradient flows of linear programs, with the rate tied to the program’s geometry, and provides improved error bounds for entropic regularization. Additionally, the authors extend their analysis to perturbed flows, proving sublinear convergence for both perturbed Fisher‑Rao and natural gradient flows, thereby encompassing state‑action natural policy gradients.
By Johannes M\"uller, Semih \c{C}ayc{\i}, Guido Mont\'ufar
arXiv:2609.06882v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Diffusion policies offer a powerful and expressive parameterization for continuous control. Yet, their integration with reinforcement learning remain...
By Mahmoud Selim, Cristina Cipriani, Karl H. Johansson
arXiv:2511. 23310v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective paradigm for post-training large language models, yet the design of its baselines and learning-rate schedules remains largely heuristic.
By Zixun Huang, Jiayi Sheng, Zeyu Zheng
arXiv:2609.14327v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Variance penalization is a principled approach to risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) that explicitly trades expected return for policy stabilit...
By Saunak Kumar Panda, Tong Li, Yisha Xiang, Ruiqi Liu
AdaStep introduces an adaptive step-credit weighting technique for agentic reinforcement learning, addressing the coarse granularity of trajectory-level objectives in long-horizon LLM agents. By formulating the weighting as a mean-squared-error estimation problem and deriving an optimal per-state shrinkage coefficient, AdaStep selectively preserves local credit when return variation is due to the chosen action and suppresses it when downstream randomness dominates. The method requires only lightweight scalar computations, no critic or extra rollouts, and demonstrates consistent performance gains across three model backbones on ALFWorld, WebShop, and ScienceWorld.
By Xin Wang, Wenhao Wu, Menghao Zhang, Zhi Wang, Kun Shao, Jian Luan
arXiv:2606. 05888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retry-based objectives such as pass@K and max@K optimize the best return obtained from multiple sampled trajectories, and recent work has shown that they can promote exploration without explicit exploration bonuses.
By Soichiro Nishimori, Paavo Parmas
arXiv:2608.24146v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In reinforcement learning policy evaluation, classic on-policy methods often suffer from high variance when estimating policy performance. To mitigate...
By Claire Chen, Shuze Daniel Liu, Licheng Luo, Rohan Chandra, Nan Jiang, Shangtong Zhang
In reinforcement learning policy evaluation, classic on-policy methods often suffer from high variance when estimating policy performance. To mitigate this issue, behavior policy search has been propo...
arXiv:2601. 22970v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Policies learned via continuous actor-critic methods often exhibit erratic, high-frequency oscillations, making them unsuitable for physical deployment.
By Jeong Woon Lee, Kyoleen Kwak, Daeho Kim, Hyoseok Hwang
arXiv:2610.03165v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Several variance-reduced versions of REINFORCE based on importance sampling achieve an improved $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ sample complexity to find an $\epsil...
By Gabor Paczolay, Matteo Papini, Alberto Maria Metelli, Istvan Harmati, Marcello Restelli