Streaming video understanding requires models to repeatedly decide whether to respond or continue observing. Recently, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has been applied to this setting, with existing approaches emphasizing reward design while retaining a single trajectory-level advantage across turns. Such shared credit can reinforce redundant replies after earlier successes and discourage useful follow-ups after earlier failures. We propose TurnWise, a turn-level GRPO framework that aligns learning with individual streaming decisions. TurnWise addresses the mismatch between trajectory-level feedback and turn-level interaction, promoting informative responses and reducing redundancy. Specifically, turn-level credit assignment uses silence-completed prefix scoring to construct group-relative advantages from each decision's remaining return, separating its learning signal from earlier rewards. Turn-mean policy optimization averages token losses within each turn and then across turns, giving response and waiting decisions equal weight regardless of output length. These complementary designs improve streaming policy learning without a learned critic or additional rollouts. Extensive experiments show our method outperforms prior RL approaches for streaming video understanding.
Variational approaches to learning transport maps for multimodal sampling can suffer from mode collapse. One way to mitigate this problem is to learn transport along a prescribed path of intermediate distributions defined by geometric annealing. We show that annealing can take a substantial detour in Wasserstein space: when mass moves between modes, the path can be much longer than the distance between its endpoints. We further link path geometry to transport learning, showing that long annealing paths can slow population optimization, while sufficiently regular paths permit rapid convergence. Motivated by these findings, we propose componentwise annealed transport (CAT) to reduce the need for mass transfer between modes. Starting from a mode-informed mixture reference, CAT constructs an exact mixture decomposition of the target and learns separate transport maps along componentwise annealing paths. We estimate the component weights separately and show that these estimates remain consistent even when the learned flows are inexact. We also develop adaptive annealing schedules guided by transport effort. Experiments on multimodal synthetic distributions and Bayesian inference problems demonstrate improvements in transport learning and sampling efficiency.
Ajay Vikram Periasami, Anjaneya Gupta, Ethan Cheng, Ivan Rosales
Balatro, a 2024 roguelike deckbuilder, presents three difficulties that have historically derailed reinforcement learning methods: a 3,000-action state-dependent action space, horizons of several hundred decisions with sparse rewards, and pervasive stochasticity in both card draws and shop generation. Published RL results on the game remain scarce. We introduce an end-to-end pipeline comprising (i) a high-throughput Rust simulator that is automatically state-diffed against the live game client via BalatroBot, (ii) a condensed observation-action interface with dynamic per-step masking of legal moves, and (iii) a multi-agent PPO architecture that decomposes play into a tactical blind policy and a strategic shop policy that share the full game state but act in disjoint phases. Long-horizon credit assignment is partially addressed by per-agent reward routing with explicit cross-agent credit. On the main joint run, training metrics show a sharp phase transition in which the first-blind clear rate converges above 99% and mean episode return increases by roughly an order of magnitude, plateauing at a mean maximum ante of 3 out of 8; single-agent baselines under identical rewards oscillated between greedy and hoarding failure modes and did not stably clear the first blind. These results establish the two-policy decomposition as a strong reactive baseline for Balatro and localise the remaining gap to long-horizon strategic planning rather than tactical blind play.