--- title: REINFORCE and Actor-critic Methods in RL | daily.dev description: Part 7 of a reinforcement learning course covering policy gradient methods from scratch. Topics include the REINFORCE algorithm, the log-derivative trick,... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/reinforce-and-actor-critic-methods-in-rl-wwgwlne6g twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: REINFORCE and Actor-critic Methods in RL | daily.dev og:description: Part 7 of a reinforcement learning course covering policy gradient methods from scratch. Topics include the REINFORCE algorithm, the log-derivative trick,... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/reinforce-and-actor-critic-methods-in-rl-wwgwlne6g og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/WwGwLNe6G.png og:image:alt: REINFORCE and Actor-critic Methods in RL og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # REINFORCE and Actor-critic Methods in RL **[Daily Dose of Data Science \| Avi Chawla \| Substack](https://daily.dev/sources/dailydoseofds)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Part 7 of a reinforcement learning course covering policy gradient methods from scratch. Topics include the REINFORCE algorithm, the log-derivative trick, variance problems, the advantage function, actor-critic architecture, generalized advantage estimation (GAE), and how LLMs are fine-tuned with RL techniques like RLHF, PPO, and GRPO. A hands-on comparison of REINFORCE vs. actor-critic on CartPole is included to illustrate variance differences in training curves. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Actor-Critic Algorithm: A Comprehensive Guide](https://daily.dev/posts/actor-critic-algorithm-a-comprehensive-guide-vwvdi6ax9) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Deep Reinforcement Learning: The Actor-Critic Method](https://daily.dev/posts/deep-reinforcement-learning-the-actor-critic-method-r1r0i1hwk) · Towards Data Science · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [The Reinforcement Learning Handbook: A Guide to Foundational Questions](https://daily.dev/posts/the-reinforcement-learning-handbook-a-guide-to-foundational-questions-0vv0xujq8) · Towards Data Science · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#python](https://daily.dev/tags/python), [#reinforcement-learning](https://daily.dev/tags/reinforcement-learning) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/reinforce-and-actor-critic-methods-in-rl-wwgwlne6g) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"REINFORCE and Actor-critic Methods in RL","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/reinforce-and-actor-critic-methods-in-rl-wwgwlne6g","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/reinforce-and-actor-critic-methods-in-rl-wwgwlne6g"},"datePublished":"2026-06-07T20:26:48.196Z","dateModified":"2026-06-07T20:27:06.304Z","description":"Part 7 of a reinforcement learning course covering policy gradient methods from scratch. 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