The paper introduces Anchored Neighborhood Optimization (ANO), a new policy‑optimization method that directly designs a smooth, bounded gain field for the probability‑ratio surrogate objective. ANO anchors the identity map at a ratio of one, peaks at a specified trust‑region boundary, and limits the influence of extreme off‑policy samples while providing a bounded, redescending pull on outliers. Empirical results show ANO consistently outperforms existing methods on Atari and MuJoCo benchmarks, and it remains robust under aggressive learning‑rate settings.
arXiv:2511. 02577v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is widely regarded as one of the most successful deep reinforcement learning algorithms, known for its robustness and effectiveness across a range of problems.
arXiv:2609.06467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In performative reinforcement learning the deployed policy shapes the environment that generates the learner's future data, and the natural solution co...
arXiv:2607. 08925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training reinforcement-learning agents directly on physical robots makes every fall costly, since a fall can damage the platform and cannot be undone like a simulator reset; the goal is therefore to minimize falls during training rather than trade them off against return, as constrained Markov decision process (MDP) formulations do.
arXiv:2609.39634v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Common policy improvement methods, including TRPO, PPO, and GRPO, estimate policy improvement under the behavioral policy's state-visitation distribu...
arXiv:2606. 30627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conservative offline training is widely advocated as a safe foundation for subsequent online adaptation: if a policy stays close to well-supported behaviour, the argument goes, it is less likely to exploit imperfections in a learned reward model.
arXiv:2606. 11431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mirror Descent (MD) extends Gradient Descent (GD) beyond Euclidean geometry and has recently reappeared as a lens for KL-regularized policy optimization in reinforcement learning and LLM post-training.
arXiv:2512. 23075v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Policy gradient methods for Large Language Models optimize a policy $\pi_\theta$ via a surrogate objective computed from samples of a rollout policy $\pi_{\text{roll}}$.
The paper presents a convergence framework for deep $V$‑learning over a finite horizon $H$, deriving explicit bounds on policy loss by decomposing the Bellman update error into six residuals. It shows how $L^s$ concentrability controls expected $L^1$ loss, quantifies the impact of shared sampling across horizon levels, and provides optimal and near‑optimal sample allocations for statistical error rates. The work also establishes sharp action‑gap bounds under a margin condition, transfers optimal‑gap results to frozen‑iterate gaps, and offers consistency guarantees for generative‑reset approximate‑ERM procedures with exact action scores.
arXiv:2608. 01130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A broad range of models face the mismatch where they are updated through trajectory losses but are evaluated by downstream task reward.
arXiv:2609.36945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the learning dynamics of fine-tuning a policy model on self-generated and reward-weighted data, with particular focus on a generalized version...
arXiv:2602. 09474v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study reinforcement learning in MDPs whose transition function is stochastic at most steps but may behave adversarially at a fixed subset of $\Lambda$ steps per episode.
Asynchronous reinforcement learning improves throughput by decoupling rollout generation from optimization, but staleness is an inevitable byproduct compounded by policy lag, engine delays, and mixture-of-experts routing. From a trust-region perspective, this mismatch is critical: training-inference divergence governs approximation error in finite-horizon bounds, whereas PPO clipping only gates sampled outward updates, acting as a sampled surrogate rather than a full-policy constraint.