{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/divergence-augmented-policy-optimization-1","title":"Divergence-Augmented Policy Optimization","arxiv_id":"2501.15034","date":"2025-01-25","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2019 12","authors":["Qing Wang","Yingru Li","Jiechao Xiong","Tong Zhang"],"abstract":"In deep reinforcement learning, policy optimization methods need to deal with issues such as function approximation and the reuse of off-policy data. Standard policy gradient methods do not handle off-policy data well, leading to premature convergence and instability. This paper introduces a method to stabilize policy optimization when off-policy data are reused. The idea is to include a Bregman divergence between the behavior policy that generates the data and the current policy to ensure small and safe policy updates with off-policy data. The Bregman divergence is calculated between the state distributions of two policies, instead of only on the action probabilities, leading to a divergence augmentation formulation. Empirical experiments on Atari games show that in the data-scarce scenario where the reuse of off-policy data becomes necessary, our method can achieve better performance than other state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning algorithms.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.15034v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15034v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"divergence-augmented-policy-optimization-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/lns/dapo","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"atari-games","task_name":"Atari Games"},{"task_slug":"deep-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Deep Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"policy-gradient-methods","task_name":"Policy Gradient Methods"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2501.15034","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}