12 papers
V-Simba: Unleashing the Architectural Potential of RL in Visual Continuous Control
Donghu Kim, Youngdo Lee, Hojoon Lee +6
Improving sample efficiency remains a core challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), especially in real-world settings like robotics, where data collection is costly. This challeng…
Why Open Source? A Game-Theoretic Analysis of the AI Race
Andjela Mladenovic, Aaron Courville, Gauthier Gidel
In recent years, with the advancement of frontier AI, we have observed certain dynamics in open-sourcing and closed-sourcing decisions. We propose a game-theoretic model to analyze…
A Comedy of Estimators: On KL Regularization in RL Training of LLMs
Vedant Shah, Johan Obando-Ceron, Vineet Jain +10
The reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) can be substantially improved by training them with reinforcement learning (RL). The RL objective for LLM training involve…
Asymmetric Proximal Policy Optimization: mini-critics boost LLM reasoning
Jiashun Liu, Johan Obando-Ceron, Han Lu +7
Most recent RL for LLMs (RL4LLM) methods avoid explicit critics, replacing them with average advantage baselines. This shift is largely pragmatic: conventional value functions are…
Simplicial Embeddings Improve Sample Efficiency in Actor-Critic Agents
Johan Obando-Ceron, Walter Mayor, Samuel Lavoie +3
Recent works have proposed accelerating the wall-clock training time of actor-critic methods via the use of large-scale environment parallelization; unfortunately, these can someti…
The Courage to Stop: Overcoming Sunk Cost Fallacy in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Jiashun Liu, Johan Obando-Ceron, Pablo Samuel Castro +2
Off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) typically leverages replay buffers for reusing past experiences during learning. This can help improve sample efficiency when the collec…
The Impact of On-Policy Parallelized Data Collection on Deep Reinforcement Learning Networks
Walter Mayor, Johan Obando-Ceron, Aaron Courville +1
The use of parallel actors for data collection has been an effective technique used in reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. The manner in which data is collected in these algori…
Stable Gradients for Stable Learning at Scale in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Roger Creus Castanyer, Johan Obando-Ceron, Lu Li +4
Scaling deep reinforcement learning networks is challenging and often results in degraded performance, yet the root causes of this failure mode remain poorly understood. Several re…
Mitigating Plasticity Loss in Continual Reinforcement Learning by Reducing Churn
Hongyao Tang, Johan Obando-Ceron, Pablo Samuel Castro +2
Plasticity, or the ability of an agent to adapt to new tasks, environments, or distributions, is crucial for continual learning. In this paper, we study the loss of plasticity in d…
Measure gradients, not activations! Enhancing neuronal activity in deep reinforcement learning
Jiashun Liu, Zihao Wu, Johan Obando-Ceron +3
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents frequently suffer from neuronal activity loss, which impairs their ability to adapt to new data and learn continually. A common method to qu…
Neuroplastic Expansion in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Jiashun Liu, Johan Obando-Ceron, Aaron Courville +1
The loss of plasticity in learning agents, analogous to the solidification of neural pathways in biological brains, significantly impedes learning and adaptation in reinforcement l…
Diffusion Generative Flow Samplers: Improving learning signals through partial trajectory optimization
Dinghuai Zhang, Ricky T. Q. Chen, Cheng-Hao Liu +2
We tackle the problem of sampling from intractable high-dimensional density functions, a fundamental task that often appears in machine learning and statistics. We extend recent sa…