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Main Authors: Delgrange, Florent, Avalos, Raphael, Röpke, Willem
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12312
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author Delgrange, Florent
Avalos, Raphael
Röpke, Willem
author_facet Delgrange, Florent
Avalos, Raphael
Röpke, Willem
contents Safe policy improvement (SPI) offers theoretical control over policy updates, yet existing guarantees largely concern offline, tabular reinforcement learning (RL). We study SPI in general online settings, when combined with world model and representation learning. We develop a theoretical framework showing that restricting policy updates to a well-defined neighborhood of the current policy ensures monotonic improvement and convergence. This analysis links transition and reward prediction losses to representation quality, yielding online, "deep" analogues of classical SPI theorems from the offline RL literature. Building on these results, we introduce DeepSPI, a principled on-policy algorithm that couples local transition and reward losses with regularised policy updates. On the ALE-57 benchmark, DeepSPI matches or exceeds strong baselines, including PPO and DeepMDPs, while retaining theoretical guarantees.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_12312
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep SPI: Safe Policy Improvement via World Models
Delgrange, Florent
Avalos, Raphael
Röpke, Willem
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Safe policy improvement (SPI) offers theoretical control over policy updates, yet existing guarantees largely concern offline, tabular reinforcement learning (RL). We study SPI in general online settings, when combined with world model and representation learning. We develop a theoretical framework showing that restricting policy updates to a well-defined neighborhood of the current policy ensures monotonic improvement and convergence. This analysis links transition and reward prediction losses to representation quality, yielding online, "deep" analogues of classical SPI theorems from the offline RL literature. Building on these results, we introduce DeepSPI, a principled on-policy algorithm that couples local transition and reward losses with regularised policy updates. On the ALE-57 benchmark, DeepSPI matches or exceeds strong baselines, including PPO and DeepMDPs, while retaining theoretical guarantees.
title Deep SPI: Safe Policy Improvement via World Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12312