Formula

Clipped Surrogate Objective Function

To address the high variance and resultant instability in policy gradient estimates, a clipped surrogate objective function is widely used. This objective incorporates a clipping mechanism to bound the importance weights, ensuring that individual policy updates do not become excessively large. The clipped utility function is formally defined as: Uclip(τ;θ)=∑t=1TClip(πθ(at∣st)πθref(at∣st))A(st,at)U_{\mathrm{clip}}(\tau;\theta) = \sum_{t=1}^{T} \mathrm{Clip}\Big( \frac{\pi_{\theta}(a_t|s_t)}{\pi_{\theta_{\mathrm{ref}}}(a_t|s_t)} \Big) A(s_t,a_t) where the clipping operation restricts the probability ratio using a specified boundary hyperparameter ϵ\epsilon: Clip(πθ(at∣st)πθref(at∣st))=min⁡(πθ(at∣st)πθref(at∣st),bound(πθ(at∣st)πθref(at∣st),1−ϵ,1+ϵ))\mathrm{Clip}\Big( \frac{\pi_{\theta}(a_t|s_t)}{\pi_{\theta_{\mathrm{ref}}}(a_t|s_t)} \Big) = \min\Big( \frac{\pi_{\theta}(a_t|s_t)}{\pi_{\theta_{\mathrm{ref}}}(a_t|s_t)},\mathrm{bound} \big(\frac{\pi_{\theta}(a_t|s_t)}{\pi_{\theta_{\mathrm{ref}}}(a_t|s_t)}, 1 - \epsilon, 1 + \epsilon \big) \Big).

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Updated 2026-05-01

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