arXiv:2608.24488v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Many continuous-control policies are optimized as unbounded Gaussians and then mapped into bounded actions. We show that where entropy is measured chan...
By Yiyang He, Zhichun Zhou, Ziwei Wang, Tao Xue, Haolin Fei
The paper investigates the problem of sharing a single critic across multiple parallel environments in reinforcement learning. It shows that when environments assign different expected returns to the same state, a shared critic must reconcile conflicting value targets, which can distort advantage estimates and misguide policy updates. The authors propose a simple fix—providing the critic with the environment index—demonstrating through bandit models and experiments on CartPole, MuJoCo, BipedalWalker, and 16 Procgen games that this conditional critic stabilizes learning and boosts returns, achieving a 40.8% improvement in aggregate normalized return on unseen levels.
By Zhenya Liu, Yang Meng, Zhuokai Zhao, Xuefeng Liu, Yuxin Chen
arXiv:2608. 01425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training LLM-based multi-agent systems with multi-agent reinforcement learning is rapidly gaining traction, and a parallel line of work argues that such systems should be judged by their behavior, not only their reward.
By Yi Mao, Andrew Perrault
arXiv:2607. 22186v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) accelerates large language model (LLM) post-training by overlapping rollout generation with policy optimization, but the resulting stale, off-policy data can destabilize optimization and ultimately cause policy collapse.
By Guanqun Zhao, Zijun Xie, Binbin Zheng, Enlei Gong, Jiafeng Lu, Yehan Yang, Aoqi Hu, Zeyu Chen
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.
By Elham Daneshmand, Majid Khadiv, Glen Berseth, Hsiu-Chin Lin
arXiv:2606. 01561v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is often formulated via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO).
By Xiwen Chen, Wenhui Zhu, Jingjing Wang, Peijie Qiu, Zhipeng Wang, Huayu Li, ZhengXiao He, Xuanzhao Dong, Prayag Tiwari, Mingkun Xu, Yujian Xiong, Feng Luo, Abolfazl Razi, Brendan Hogan Rappazzo, Anderson Schneider, Yuriy Nevmyvaka