Repulsive Population Policy Gradients for Behaviorally Diverse Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

The goal of Quality-Diversity Reinforcement Learning (QD-RL) is to find a population of high-performing policies that solve a decision-making problem in diverse ways. Despite recent progress, QD-RL methods predominantly rely on evolutionary operators--including black-box optimizers, mutations, and crossovers--to facilitate exploration and induce diversity. Scaling these methods becomes increasingly costly as policies and behavior spaces grow larger. Building on the Soft QD view of quality-diversity optimization, we introduce \textbf{Re}pulsive \textbf{P}opulation \textbf{P}olicy \textbf{O}ptimization (\textbf{RePPO}), which adapts PPO to jointly optimize a compact population of diverse, high-quality policies using a population-dependent, dynamically shaped reward. On standard continuous-control tasks, RePPO achieves a strong quality-diversity tradeoff compared with state-of-the-art QD-RL methods. Ablations further characterize this tradeoff by examining how each component affects individual quality and collective diversity. To assess RePPO's scalability, we extend our evaluation to learning from pixels and fine-tuning large language models. In pixel-based tasks, where large policies make most traditional QD-RL methods infeasible, RePPO maintains quality on par with standard PPO while achieving substantially higher diversity. Its successful application to language model fine-tuning further demonstrates, for the first time, that QD-RL methods can scale to this domain. Together, these results show that directly optimizing compact populations with RePPO provides a scalable approach to QD-RL across increasingly complex domains.