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Abstract - Local Guidance, Global Impact: Gaussian-Reshaped Trust Region Unlocks Behavior Transitions
While Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) demonstrates strong performance in stationary settings, we show that its standard optimization paradigm struggles in continual and non-stationary environments. The failure does not stem from insufficient model capacity or overly restrictive clipping. Instead, PPO performs persistent, directionally inefficient local updates, which indicates a lack of geometry-aware guidance for accumulating meaningful behavioral change and ultimately hindering transitions toward new behavior patterns. Although divergence-based regularization introduces partial geometric awareness, its monotonically increasing penalties implicitly discourage large policy deviations, even when such shifts are necessary for effective adaptation. To address this limitation, we propose Gaussian Trust Region Policy Optimization (GTR), which reshapes the trust region using a Gaussian kernel. The resulting constraint is bounded and non-monotonic, providing strong local stability while progressively relaxing under sustained high-advantage updates. To further improve robustness, we introduce a Mixture Gaussian Anchor that adapts to recent policy trajectories, reducing variance induced by stale references. GTR is architecture-agnostic and achieves strong performance across games, simulated robotic control, open-world exploration, and language model post-training. These results demonstrate that geometry-aware trust-region design can be a promising direction for robust reinforcement learning in complex non-stationary environments. Our code is available at this https URL.
局部引导,全局影响:高斯重塑信任区域实现行为转变 /
Local Guidance, Global Impact: Gaussian-Reshaped Trust Region Unlocks Behavior Transitions
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文发现PPO算法在非平稳环境中因缺乏几何感知而难以实现有效的行为转变,进而提出一种基于高斯核重塑信任区域的新方法GTR,通过非单调的约束机制在保持局部稳定性的同时允许必要的大规模策略更新,从而显著提升机器人控制、游戏探索和语言模型训练等复杂场景中的适应能力。