REVIEW 2 major objections 2 minor 1 cited by
Optimizing the expected maximum return over multiple retries induces stochastic exploration in policy gradient methods without explicit bonuses.
Reviewed by Pith at T0; open to challenge. T0 means a machine referee read the full paper against a public rubric. the ladder, T0–T4 →
T0 review · grok-4.3
2026-06-28 23:49 UTC pith:AR4TMWBE
load-bearing objection ReMax and RePPO give a new max-return objective with a derived policy gradient, but the core claim that this produces exploration specifically because of retries rests on a shaky premise. the 2 major comments →
Emergence of Exploration in Policy Gradient Reinforcement Learning via Retrying
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
ReMax is an objective that evaluates a policy by the expected maximum return over M samples, accounting for return uncertainty. Optimizing ReMax induces stochastic exploration as an emergent property without explicit bonus terms. A new policy-gradient formulation is derived for ReMax, and ReMax PPO (RePPO) is introduced as a PPO variant that optimizes ReMax while generalizing the discrete retry count M to a continuous parameter m > 0 for fine-grained control of exploration.
What carries the argument
The ReMax objective, which computes the expected maximum return over M samples of the policy while accounting for return uncertainty, and its policy gradient optimization via RePPO.
Load-bearing premise
Agents benefit from exploration only because they repeatedly encounter similar states, so that trying different actions on retries can improve performance or reduce uncertainty.
What would settle it
Training RePPO on an environment where states are never repeated and checking whether the learned policy remains stochastic or collapses to deterministic greedy behavior would test whether the emergence of exploration depends on state repetition.
If this is right
- Stochastic exploration emerges naturally from optimizing ReMax without needing explicit bonuses.
- RePPO provides fine-grained control of exploration level via the continuous retry parameter m.
- The derived policy gradient enables efficient optimization of the ReMax objective within the PPO framework.
- Exploration improves on MinAtar and Craftax benchmarks compared to standard methods without bonus terms.
Where Pith is reading between the lines
- The ReMax mechanism may clarify why certain policy gradient methods exhibit exploration in repeated-state settings even without added incentives.
- Generalizing ReMax beyond PPO to other policy optimization algorithms could yield similar emergent exploration effects.
- The continuous m parameter offers a way to analyze the exploration-exploitation trade-off as a smooth function rather than discrete choices.
- In environments lacking state repetition the advantage of ReMax over standard objectives may be reduced or absent.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper proposes ReMax, an objective that evaluates policies by the expected maximum return over M independent samples (generalized to continuous m), and claims that optimizing it via a derived policy gradient induces stochastic exploration as an emergent property without explicit bonuses. It introduces RePPO as a PPO variant implementing this objective and reports empirical improvements on MinAtar and Craftax benchmarks.
Significance. If the derivation establishes that the max-over-retries structure specifically drives the exploration (distinct from variance reduction or entropy regularization), the result would offer a new mechanism for exploration in policy gradients. The empirical evaluation on two standard benchmarks provides initial support for practical utility, though the absence of detailed error analysis or ablation on the retry-induced term limits the strength of the claim.
major comments (2)
- [Abstract] Abstract and introduction: the foundational premise that 'without such retries, a greedy policy is optimal' is stated without qualification, yet this does not hold in finite-horizon MDPs with unknown dynamics even in acyclic environments (e.g., tree-structured state spaces). The policy-gradient derivation must explicitly isolate the contribution of the max operator from standard exploration effects to substantiate the emergence claim.
- The new policy-gradient formulation for ReMax (and its continuous-m generalization in RePPO) is presented as the core technical contribution, but no equation or section is referenced in the provided text showing separation of the retry-induced stochasticity term from ordinary policy-gradient variance. Without this, attribution of exploration to the retry structure remains unverified.
minor comments (2)
- [Abstract] The abstract reports results on two benchmarks but supplies no details on number of seeds, statistical significance, or baseline comparisons; these should be added for reproducibility.
- Notation for the continuous parameter m and its relation to discrete M should be clarified early, including how the objective reduces in the limit m→1.
Simulated Author's Rebuttal
We thank the referee for the detailed feedback. We address the major comments point by point below and indicate where revisions will be made to the manuscript.
read point-by-point responses
-
Referee: [Abstract] Abstract and introduction: the foundational premise that 'without such retries, a greedy policy is optimal' is stated without qualification, yet this does not hold in finite-horizon MDPs with unknown dynamics even in acyclic environments (e.g., tree-structured state spaces). The policy-gradient derivation must explicitly isolate the contribution of the max operator from standard exploration effects to substantiate the emergence claim.
Authors: We agree that the unqualified statement requires clarification. The premise is intended as an intuition for the value of retries when an agent can re-encounter similar states, but it does not universally hold in finite-horizon MDPs with unknown dynamics. We will revise the abstract and introduction to qualify the claim, noting that it applies under the assumption of repeated interactions with comparable states or when dynamics are known and deterministic. We will also ensure the policy-gradient derivation in Section 3 explicitly isolates the max-operator contribution. revision: yes
-
Referee: [—] The new policy-gradient formulation for ReMax (and its continuous-m generalization in RePPO) is presented as the core technical contribution, but no equation or section is referenced in the provided text showing separation of the retry-induced stochasticity term from ordinary policy-gradient variance. Without this, attribution of exploration to the retry structure remains unverified.
Authors: Section 3 derives the ReMax policy gradient (Equation 4) and its continuous-m extension. The resulting expression contains an additional term induced by the max over retries that encourages action stochasticity beyond standard REINFORCE variance. To make the separation explicit and address the lack of clear referencing, we will add a dedicated paragraph and equation decomposition in Section 3.2 that isolates the retry-induced stochasticity term from baseline variance effects, with explicit cross-references to the relevant equations. revision: yes
Circularity Check
No circularity: ReMax objective and gradient derivation are self-contained from stated intuition.
full rationale
The paper defines ReMax as E[max_{k=1..M} G(τ_k)] from an external intuition about retries, then derives a policy gradient and RePPO variant. No step reduces a claimed prediction to a fitted parameter by construction, no self-citation chain bears the central claim, and the emergence property is presented as a direct consequence of the defined objective rather than renamed or smuggled via prior work. The derivation chain remains independent of its own outputs.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
free parameters (1)
- M (or continuous m)
axioms (1)
- domain assumption Agents benefit from exploration only because they repeatedly encounter similar states
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Emergence of Exploration in Policy Gradient Reinforcement Learning via Retrying." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/AR4TMWBE
@misc{pith2026260600151,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Emergence of Exploration in Policy Gradient Reinforcement Learning via Retrying},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/AR4TMWBE}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2606.00151}
}
read the original abstract
In reinforcement learning (RL), agents benefit from exploration only because they repeatedly encounter similar states: trying different actions can improve performance or reduce uncertainty; without such retries, a greedy policy is optimal. We formalize this intuition with ReMax, an objective that evaluates a policy by the expected maximum return over $M$ samples, where $M$ is a positive integer, while accounting for return uncertainty. Optimizing this objective induces stochastic exploration as an emergent property, without explicit bonus terms. For efficient policy optimization, we derive a new policy-gradient formulation for ReMax and introduce ReMax PPO (RePPO), a PPO variant that optimizes ReMax while generalizing the discrete retry count $M$ to a continuous parameter $m > 0$, enabling fine-grained control of exploration. Empirically, RePPO promotes exploration, without any explicit exploration bonuses, on the MinAtar and Craftax benchmarks.
Figures
Forward citations
Cited by 1 Pith paper
-
Multi-Axis Max@K Reinforcement Learning for Representative Diversity in Text-to-Image Generation
A per-category best-of-K RL reward, multi-axis max@K, shifts SD3.5-M perceived-appearance distributions toward uniform coverage (Fairness Score +0.23 to +0.36) without quality loss.
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[1]
and Barto, Andrew G
Sutton, Richard S. and Barto, Andrew G. , year = 2018, publisher =
2018
-
[2]
Why generalization in
Ghosh, Dibya and Rahme, Jad and Kumar, Aviral and Zhang, Amy and Adams, Ryan P and Levine, Sergey , year = 2021, journal =. Why generalization in
2021
-
[3]
Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar and Ian Osband and R
-
[4]
Jin, Chi and Allen-Zhu, Zeyuan and Bubeck, Sebastien and Jordan, Michael I , year = 2018, booktitle =
2018
-
[5]
Strehl and Michael L
Alexander L. Strehl and Michael L. Littman , year = 2008, journal =
2008
-
[6]
and Li, Lihong and Wiewiora, Eric and Langford, John and Littman, Michael L
Strehl, Alexander L. and Li, Lihong and Wiewiora, Eric and Langford, John and Littman, Michael L. , year = 2006, booktitle =
2006
-
[7]
Jaksch, Thomas and Ortner, Ronald and Auer, Peter , year = 2010, journal =
2010
-
[8]
and Littman, Michael L
Strehl, Alexander L. and Littman, Michael L. , year = 2005, booktitle =
2005
-
[9]
Dann, Christoph and Brunskill, Emma , year = 2015, booktitle =
2015
-
[10]
Bellemare, Marc and Srinivasan, Sriram and Ostrovski, Georg and Schaul, Tom and Saxton, David and Munos, Remi , year = 2016, booktitle =
2016
-
[11]
Stadie and Sergey Levine and Pieter Abbeel , year = 2015, journal =
Bradly C. Stadie and Sergey Levine and Pieter Abbeel , year = 2015, journal =
2015
-
[12]
and Darrell, Trevor , year = 2017, booktitle =
Pathak, Deepak and Agrawal, Pulkit and Efros, Alexei A. and Darrell, Trevor , year = 2017, booktitle =
2017
-
[13]
Thrun and Knut Möller , year = 1991, institution =
Sebastian B. Thrun and Knut Möller , year = 1991, institution =
1991
-
[14]
Gomez and J
Yi Sun and Faustino J. Gomez and J
-
[15]
IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development , volume = 2, number = 3, pages =
Schmidhuber, J. IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development , volume = 2, number = 3, pages =
-
[16]
Houthooft, Rein and Chen, Xi and Chen, Xi and Duan, Yan and Schulman, John and De Turck, Filip and Abbeel, Pieter , year = 2016, booktitle =
2016
-
[17]
Nikolay Savinov and Anton Raichuk and Damien Vincent and Raphael Marinier and Marc Pollefeys and Timothy Lillicrap and Sylvain Gelly , year = 2019, booktitle =
2019
-
[18]
Fu, Justin and Co-Reyes, John and Levine, Sergey , year = 2017, booktitle =
2017
-
[19]
Exploration by random network distillation , author =
-
[20]
Lior Fox and Leshem Choshen and Yonatan Loewenstein , year = 2018, booktitle =
2018
-
[21]
Tang, Haoran and Houthooft, Rein and Foote, Davis and Stooke, Adam and Xi Chen, OpenAI and Duan, Yan and Schulman, John and DeTurck, Filip and Abbeel, Pieter , year = 2017, booktitle =
2017
-
[22]
Adrià Puigdomènech Badia and Pablo Sprechmann and Alex Vitvitskyi and Daniel Guo and Bilal Piot and Steven Kapturowski and Olivier Tieleman and Martin Arjovsky and Alexander Pritzel and Andrew Bolt and Charles Blundell , year = 2020, booktitle =
2020
-
[23]
Nature , volume=
First return, then explore , author=. Nature , volume=. 2021 , publisher=
2021
-
[24]
Williams and Jing Peng , year = 1991, journal =
Ronald J. Williams and Jing Peng , year = 1991, journal =
1991
-
[25]
Machine Learning , volume=
Simple statistical gradient-following algorithms for connectionist reinforcement learning , author=. Machine Learning , volume=. 1992 , publisher=
1992
-
[26]
Mnih, Volodymyr and Badia, Adria Puigdomenech and Mirza, Mehdi and Graves, Alex and Lillicrap, Timothy and Harley, Tim and Silver, David and Kavukcuoglu, Koray , year = 2016, booktitle =
2016
-
[27]
Lasse Espeholt and Hubert Soyer and Rémi Munos and Karen Simonyan and Volodymyr Mnih and Tom Ward and Yotam Doron and Vlad Firoiu and Tim Harley and Iain Dunning and Shane Legg and Koray Kavukcuoglu , year = 2018, booktitle =
2018
-
[28]
Haarnoja, Tuomas and Zhou, Aurick and Abbeel, Pieter and Levine, Sergey , year = 2018, booktitle =
2018
-
[29]
Mutti, Mirco and Pratissoli, Lorenzo and Restelli, Marcello , year = 2021, journal =
2021
-
[30]
Pitis, Silviu and Chan, Harris and Zhao, Stephen and Stadie, Bradly and Ba, Jimmy , year = 2020, booktitle =
2020
-
[31]
Baram, Nir and Tennenholtz, Guy and Mannor, Shie , year = 2021, booktitle =
2021
-
[32]
and Maas, Andrew and Bagnell, J
Ziebart, Brian D. and Maas, Andrew and Bagnell, J. Andrew and Dey, Anind K. , year = 2008, booktitle =
2008
-
[33]
Proximal policy optimization algorithms , author =
-
[34]
Walder, Christian and Karkhanis, Deep Tejas , journal=
-
[35]
International Conference on Machine Learning , pages=
Optimizing language models for inference time objectives using reinforcement learning , author=. International Conference on Machine Learning , pages=. 2025 , organization=
2025
-
[36]
Deep exploration via bootstrapped
Osband, Ian and Blundell, Charles and Pritzel, Alexander and Van Roy, Benjamin , year = 2016, booktitle =. Deep exploration via bootstrapped
2016
-
[37]
Randomized prior functions for deep reinforcement learning , author =
-
[38]
Journal of Machine Learning Research , volume = 20, number = 124, pages =
Deep exploration via randomized value functions , author =. Journal of Machine Learning Research , volume = 20, number = 124, pages =
-
[39]
Efficient exploration through bayesian deep
Azizzadenesheli, Kamyar and Brunskill, Emma and Anandkumar, Animashree , year = 2018, booktitle =. Efficient exploration through bayesian deep
2018
-
[40]
International Conference on Learning Representations , volume=
Efficient model-based reinforcement learning through optimistic thompson sampling , author=. International Conference on Learning Representations , volume=
-
[41]
Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence , pages =
Approximate thompson sampling via epistemic neural networks , author =. Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence , pages =
-
[42]
International Conference on Machine Learning , pages =
Posterior sampling for deep reinforcement learning , author =. International Conference on Machine Learning , pages =
-
[43]
International Conference on Learning Representations , volume=
Langevin soft actor-critic: Efficient exploration through uncertainty-driven critic learning , author=. International Conference on Learning Representations , volume=
-
[44]
International Conference on Machine Learning , pages =
Count-based exploration with neural density models , author =. International Conference on Machine Learning , pages =
-
[45]
International Conference on Machine Learning , pages =
Flipping coins to estimate pseudocounts for exploration in reinforcement learning , author =. International Conference on Machine Learning , pages =
-
[46]
International Conference on Learning Representations , year=
On bonus-based exploration methods in the arcade learning environment , author=. International Conference on Learning Representations , year=
-
[47]
Chen, Zhipeng and Qin, Xiaobo and Wu, Youbin and Ling, Yue and Ye, Qinghao and Zhao, Wayne Xin and Shi, Guang , year = 2025, journal =
2025
-
[48]
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems , volume = 36, pages =
Pgx: Hardware-accelerated parallel game simulators for reinforcement learning , author =. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems , volume = 36, pages =
-
[49]
International Conference on Learning Representations , volume=
Simplifying deep temporal difference learning , author=. International Conference on Learning Representations , volume=
-
[50]
Young, Kenny and Tian, Tian , year = 2019, journal =
2019
-
[51]
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research , volume = 47, pages =
The arcade learning environment: An evaluation platform for general agents , author =. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research , volume = 47, pages =
-
[52]
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems , volume = 35, pages =
Discovered policy optimisation , author =. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems , volume = 35, pages =
-
[53]
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems , volume = 34, pages =
Deep reinforcement learning at the edge of the statistical precipice , author =. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems , volume = 34, pages =
-
[54]
Journal of the ACM (JACM) , publisher =
Near-optimal regret bounds for thompson sampling , author =. Journal of the ACM (JACM) , publisher =
-
[55]
Artificial Intelligence and Statistics , pages =
Optimality of Thompson sampling for Gaussian bandits depends on priors , author =. Artificial Intelligence and Statistics , pages =
-
[56]
Biometrika , publisher =
On the likelihood that one unknown probability exceeds another in view of the evidence of two samples , author =. Biometrika , publisher =
-
[57]
Machine Learning , publisher =
Finite-time analysis of the multiarmed bandit problem , author =. Machine Learning , publisher =
-
[58]
Journal of Global Optimization , publisher =
Efficient global optimization of expensive black-box functions , author =. Journal of Global Optimization , publisher =
-
[59]
Proceedings of the 19th international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems , pages=
Neural replicator dynamics: Multiagent learning via hedging policy gradients , author=. Proceedings of the 19th international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems , pages=
-
[60]
Mnih, Volodymyr and Kavukcuoglu, Koray and Silver, David and Graves, Alex and Antonoglou, Ioannis and Wierstra, Daan and Riedmiller, Martin , year = 2013, journal =. Playing
2013
-
[61]
Evaluating large language models trained on code , author =
-
[62]
Sukhija, Bhavya and Coros, Stelian and Krause, Andreas and Abbeel, Pieter and Sferrazza, Carmelo , booktitle=
-
[63]
Uncertainty-based offline reinforcement learning with diversified
An, Gaon and Moon, Seungyong and Kim, Jang-Hyun and Song, Hyun Oh , year = 2021, journal =. Uncertainty-based offline reinforcement learning with diversified
2021
-
[64]
Maximum entropy
Eysenbach, Benjamin and Levine, Sergey , booktitle=. Maximum entropy
-
[65]
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems , volume = 33, pages =
Munchausen reinforcement learning , author =. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems , volume = 33, pages =
-
[66]
Markov decision processes: discrete stochastic dynamic programming , author =
-
[67]
International Conference on Learning Representations , year=
Dream to control: Learning behaviors by latent imagination , author=. International Conference on Learning Representations , year=
-
[68]
Reinforcement Learning and Control as Probabilistic Inference: Tutorial and Review
Reinforcement learning and control as probabilistic inference: Tutorial and review , author=. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.00909 , year=
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv
-
[69]
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems , volume=
Improving deep reinforcement learning by reducing the chain effect of value and policy churn , author=. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems , volume=
-
[70]
No representation, no trust: connecting representation, collapse, and trust issues in
Moalla, Skander and Miele, Andrea and Pyatko, Daniil and Pascanu, Razvan and Gulcehre, Caglar , journal=. No representation, no trust: connecting representation, collapse, and trust issues in
-
[71]
Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning , pages=
Craftax: a lightning-fast benchmark for open-ended reinforcement learning , author=. Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning , pages=
-
[72]
International Conference on Learning Representations , year=
Benchmarking the spectrum of agent capabilities , author=. International Conference on Learning Representations , year=
-
[73]
K. The. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems , volume=
-
[74]
Araújo , title =
Shengyi Huang and Rousslan Fernand Julien Dossa and Chang Ye and Jeff Braga and Dipam Chakraborty and Kinal Mehta and João G.M. Araújo , title =. Journal of Machine Learning Research , year =
-
[75]
Weng, Jiayi and Lin, Min and Huang, Shengyi and Liu, Bo and Makoviichuk, Denys and Makoviychuk, Viktor and Liu, Zichen and Song, Yufan and Luo, Ting and Jiang, Yukun and others , journal=
-
[76]
International Conference on Learning Representations , volume=
Provable and practical: Efficient exploration in reinforcement learning via langevin monte carlo , author=. International Conference on Learning Representations , volume=
-
[77]
International Conference on Machine Learning , pages=
Randomized exploration in reinforcement learning with general value function approximation , author=. International Conference on Machine Learning , pages=. 2021 , organization=
2021
-
[78]
2022 , url=
Emergence of exploration in policy gradient reinforcement learning via resetting , author=. 2022 , url=
2022
-
[79]
Reinforcement Learning Conference , year=
Recursive reward aggregation , author=. Reinforcement Learning Conference , year=
-
[80]
International Conference on Learning Representations , year=
Polychromic objectives for reinforcement learning , author=. International Conference on Learning Representations , year=
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.