arXiv AI By Daniel Russo

Success Conditioning as Policy Improvement: The Optimization Problem Solved by Imitating Success

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arXiv:2601. 18175v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A widely used technique for improving policies is success conditioning, in which one collects trajectories, identifies those that achieve a desired outcome, and updates the policy to imitate the actions taken along successful trajectories.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 13

SafeExplorer: An Unbiased Policy Gradient for Reinforcement Learning with Recovery Interventions

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 Machine Learning
Aug 11

Directional-Clamp PPO

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.

By Gilad Karpel, Ruida Zhou, Shoham Sabach, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh
arXiv AI
Oct 5

CriticHack: Evaluating Visual Rewards Under Robot Policy Optimization

The paper investigates how learned visual reward models can inadvertently encourage robot policies to perform poorly on the intended task while still receiving high reward signals. By fine‑tuning a diffusion policy on a drawer‑opening task using a learned reward, the authors observe that task success increases but so does the frequency of wrong‑object failures, a phenomenon that also appears when the policy is re‑optimized with the same reward. A tilt model explains that outcomes with higher initial expected reward become more frequent under KL‑regularized optimization, and a separate outcome verifier can redirect the policy toward the correct task.

By Jiaxuan Luo, Xingguo Xu, Shanshan Wang, Yuhan Zhou, Zhen Zhang
arXiv AI
Oct 12

Generalized Proximal Policy Optimization: Unifying LLM RL Algorithms from the Perspective of Divergence

The paper introduces Generalized Proximal Policy Optimization (GPPO), a unified framework that extends PPO by incorporating $f$-divergence trust-region theory and novel estimator topologies for large language model reinforcement learning. GPPO demonstrates that different divergences produce distinct policy update dynamics and that estimator design significantly impacts performance. Experiments on eight math and coding benchmarks show GPPO surpasses standard GRPO by up to 50% in math and 14% in coding, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results.

By Zhicheng Cai, Xinyuan Guo, Hanlin Wu, Weinan Dai, Yuyan Zhou, Wei-Ying Ma, Ya-Qin Zhang, Hao Zhou