We’re releasing a new class of reinforcement learning algorithms, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), which perform comparably or better than state-of-the-art approaches while being much simpler to implement and tune. PPO has become the default reinforcement learning algorithm at OpenAI because of its ease of use and good performance.
arXiv:2512. 06547v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Decoupled PPO has been a successful reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to deal with the high data staleness under the asynchronous RL setting.
arXiv:2404. 13879v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Uncertainties in transition dynamics pose a critical challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), often resulting in performance degradation of trained policies when deployed on hardware.
We’re open-sourcing OpenAI Baselines, our internal effort to reproduce reinforcement learning algorithms with performance on par with published results. We’ll release the algorithms over upcoming months; today’s release includes DQN and three of its variants.
arXiv:2606. 26327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In actor-critic reinforcement learning, network architectures are typically manually designed.
arXiv:2606. 00151v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In reinforcement learning (RL), agents benefit from exploration only because they repeatedly encounter similar states: trying different actions can improve performance or reduce uncertainty; without such retries, a greedy policy is optimal.
arXiv:2606. 23932v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is the standard policy-gradient algorithm for on-policy reinforcement learning.
We’ve trained an agent to achieve a high score of 74,500 on Montezuma’s Revenge from a single human demonstration, better than any previously published result. Our algorithm is simple: the agent plays a sequence of games starting from carefully chosen states from the demonstration, and learns from them by optimizing the game score using PPO, the same reinforcement learning algorithm that underpins OpenAI Five.
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:2605. 22305v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We analytically solve the Mountain Car problem, a canonical benchmark in RL, and derive an optimal control solution, closing a gap after 36 years.
arXiv:2608. 02951v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) for general stochastic MDPs often requires training a reward model.
We’ve discovered that evolution strategies (ES), an optimization technique that’s been known for decades, rivals the performance of standard reinforcement learning (RL) techniques on modern RL benchmarks (e. g.
arXiv:2605. 14982v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We address the discounted reward setting in reinforcement learning (RL).