Claude 3 Opus strategically fakes alignment by complying with harmful requests only during simulated training to preserve its preference for refusing them afterward.
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Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms
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abstract
We propose a new family of policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning, which alternate between sampling data through interaction with the environment, and optimizing a "surrogate" objective function using stochastic gradient ascent. Whereas standard policy gradient methods perform one gradient update per data sample, we propose a novel objective function that enables multiple epochs of minibatch updates. The new methods, which we call proximal policy optimization (PPO), have some of the benefits of trust region policy optimization (TRPO), but they are much simpler to implement, more general, and have better sample complexity (empirically). Our experiments test PPO on a collection of benchmark tasks, including simulated robotic locomotion and Atari game playing, and we show that PPO outperforms other online policy gradient methods, and overall strikes a favorable balance between sample complexity, simplicity, and wall-time.
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- abstract We propose a new family of policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning, which alternate between sampling data through interaction with the environment, and optimizing a "surrogate" objective function using stochastic gradient ascent. Whereas standard policy gradient methods perform one gradient update per data sample, we propose a novel objective function that enables multiple epochs of minibatch updates. The new methods, which we call proximal policy optimization (PPO), have some of the benefits of trust region policy optimization (TRPO), but they are much simpler to implement, more ge
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citing papers explorer
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Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Sparse-Reward Search in Commutative Algebra
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A Markov Chain Approach to Preference Alignment
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Training the Orchestrator: A Supervised Approach to End-to-End PDDL Planning with LLM Agents
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Through the PRISM: Preference Representation in Intermediate States of Video Diffusion Models
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The Reward Was in Your Data All Along: Correcting Flow Matching with Discriminator-Guided RL
DRL trains a discriminator on data versus base-model samples in pretrained representation space and uses its logit as reward in KL-regularized RL, cutting guidance-free FID from 9.38 to 2.62 on SiT and similar gains on other backbones.
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Learning from Your Own Mistakes: Constructing Learnable Micro-Reflective Trajectories for Self-Distillation
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Recover, Discover, Plan: Learning Skills and Concepts from Robot Failures
ReSYNC learns recovery skills via RL then discovers and refines relational predicates to enable abstract planning that generalizes failure avoidance to unseen long-horizon tasks, outperforming baselines by over 50% in simulation and transferring to real robots.
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Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization: Teacher in Prompts, Not Gradients
ZPPO improves distillation to small vision-language models by using binary and negative candidate prompts plus a replay buffer for hard questions, outperforming standard distillation and GRPO on a 31-benchmark suite with largest gains at the 0.8B scale.
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WireCraft: A Simulation Benchmark for Industrial DLO Manipulation
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PearlVLA: Progressive Embodied Action-Plan Refinement in Latent Space
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Work Extraction via Backward Motion in Optimal Closed-Loop Stochastic Control
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PowerOPD: Stabilizing On-Policy Distillation with Bounded Power Transformation
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ReSum: Synergizing LLM Reasoning and Summarization with Reinforcement Learning
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Demystifying Hidden-State Recurrence: Switchable Latent Reasoning with On-Policy Reinforcement Learning
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EgoEngine: From Egocentric Human Videos to High-Fidelity Dexterous Robot Demonstrations
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Mathematical perspective on genetic algorithms with optimization guided operators
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Harnessing Routing Foresight for Micro-step-level MoE load balancing in RL Post-training
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Hey Chat, Can You Teach Me? Structuring Socratic Dialogue for Human Learning in the Wild
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Learning Object Manipulation from Scratch via Contrastive Interaction
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INFRAMIND: Infrastructure-Aware Multi-Agent Orchestration
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Mirror Descent Beyond Euclidean Stability: An Exponential Separation in Initialization Sensitivity
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Dynamic Execution Horizon Prediction for Chunk-based Robot Policies
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Flow-DPPO: Divergence Proximal Policy Optimization for Flow Matching Models
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Expected Free Energy-based Planning as Variational Inference
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Seeing Before Colliding: Anticipatory Safe RL with Frozen Vision-Language Models
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Beyond Absolute Imitation: Anchored Residual Guidance for Privileged On-Policy Distillation
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Mult-DPO: Multinomial Direct Preference Optimization for Recommender Systems
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ReCoVLA: VLM-Guided Reward Compilation for Failure Recovery in Vision-Language-Action Policies
ReCoVLA improves VLA policy reliability by using a VLM as a semantic reward selector to train residual recovery policies in simulation, raising average success from 36.7% to 66.7% in sim and achieving 61.7% in zero-shot sim-to-real physical tests.
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Escaping the KL Agreement Trap in On-Policy Distillation
KAT detects persistent low-KL agreement traps in on-policy distillation via a dynamic threshold to filter weak supervision, improving avg@k by 2.66% and pass@k by 3.43% on four math benchmarks while shortening rollouts by 59.73%.
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CRANE: Knowledge Editing for Reasoning MLLMs
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HARBOR: A Harness Framework for Agentic Robot Reinforcement Learning
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Reinforcement Learning for Flow-Matching Policies with Density Transport
RLDT fine-tunes pretrained flow-matching policies for continuous control by aligning them to a max-entropy RL transport field constructed via SVGD, using expected-target estimation for stable multi-step updates.
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Real-IKEA: Physical Fidelity is the Prerequisite for Robust Manipulation
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ActProbe: Action-Space Probe for Early Failure Detection of Generative Robot Policies
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Modelling Opinion Dynamics at Scale with Deep MARL
Deep MARL models opinion dynamics at scale, showing high conformity reduces collective accuracy in large networks while sometimes improving it in small ones.
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AdaTok: Self-Budgeting Image Tokenization with Quality-Preserving Dynamic Tokens
AdaTok learns content-dependent token budgets for discrete 1D image tokenization via prioritized representation learning and a GRPO allocation policy, achieving rFID 1.50 at ~118 tokens average versus fixed 256-token baselines.
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Adversarial Robustness of Activation Steering in Large Language Models
First systematic test shows activation steering robustness drops sharply (up to 64%) under adversarial input perturbations across multiple extraction methods, models, and personas.
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DPAgent-in-the-Middle: Agentic Defense and Repair Against AI-Groomed Deceptive Patterns
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Learn to Match: Two-Sided Matching with Temporally Extended Feedback
Learn2Match is a POMG-based MARL benchmark for two-sided matching with temporally extended feedback; independent PPO yields higher social welfare and lower regret than CA-ETC but higher information-friction loss.
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Your GFlowNet Secretly Learns an Optimal Transport Plan
Minimum-flow GFlowNets on graphs encode optimal transport plans, with the learned policy recovering the optimal coupling between source and target distributions.
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Online KL-Regularized Reinforcement Learning with Function Approximation under Misspecification
Introduces KL misspecification for bandits and RL under function approximation and proves explicit KL-regret bounds for regression-based Gibbs algorithms that recover the realizable case.
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ACE-SQL: Adaptive Co-Optimization via Empirical Credit Assignment for Text-to-SQL
ACE-SQL jointly optimizes schema linking and SQL generation via RL with empirical credit assignment from execution-correct rollouts, achieving 65.3% greedy execution accuracy on BIRD Dev using 0.93k output tokens.
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Step-by-Step Optimization-like Reasoning in LLMs over Expanding Search Spaces
Introduces OPT* tasks and two training regimes (solver-guided online policy optimization with rank-based reward shaping and search-based offline RL) plus a theoretical link between search success and information extraction per budget unit, showing empirical gains in optimization-like reasoning.
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Reinforcement Learning from Rich Feedback with Distributional DAgger
DistIL applies distributional DAgger with forward cross-entropy to achieve monotonic policy improvement and better Pass@N from rich feedback in RL for reasoning tasks.
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Policy-Conditioned Counterfactual Credit for Verifiable Reinforcement Learning of Long-Horizon Language Agents
CVT-RL improves verified task success to 78.9% and reduces hacking to 3.9% in long-horizon language agents by combining intervention-validity gating with a selection-adjusted doubly robust PCCC estimator.
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Alpha-RTL: Test-Time Training for RTL Hardware Optimization
TTT-RTL performs per-design test-time RL on an LLM policy with EDA-derived PPA rewards and an adaptive KL controller, reducing geometric-mean PPA product by 65.1% on RTLLM v2.0 and ADP by 59.4% on an industrial FPU unit.