Related papers: Incorrigibility in the CIRL Framework
LLMs utilizing chain-of-thought reasoning often waste substantial compute by producing long, incorrect responses. Abstention can mitigate this by withholding outputs unlikely to be correct. While most abstention methods decide to withhold…
Humans use social context to specify preferences over behaviors, i.e. their reward functions. Yet, algorithms for inferring reward models from preference data do not take this social learning view into account. Inspired by pragmatic human…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to infer a reward from expert demonstrations, motivated by the idea that the reward, rather than the policy, is the most succinct and transferable description of a task [Ng et al., 2000]. However,…
We consider the problem of inference for parameters selected to report only after some algorithm, the canonical example being inference for model parameters after a model selection procedure. The conditional correction for selection…
In safety-critical applications of reinforcement learning such as healthcare and robotics, it is often desirable to optimize risk-sensitive objectives that account for tail outcomes rather than expected reward. We prove the first regret…
Many real-life decisions involve both perceptual processes and weighing the consequences of different actions. However, the neural mechanisms underlying perceptual decisions have typically been examined separately from those underlying…
Interactive-Grounded Learning (IGL) [Xie et al., 2021] is a powerful framework in which a learner aims at maximizing unobservable rewards through interacting with an environment and observing reward-dependent feedback on the taken actions.…
For an AI's training process to successfully impart a desired goal, it is important that the AI does not attempt to resist the training. However, partially learned goals will often incentivize an AI to avoid further goal updates, as most…
Approaches to keeping a dynamical system within state constraints typically rely on a model-based safety condition to limit the control signals. In the face of significant modeling uncertainty, the system can suffer from important…
Large language models (LLMs) could be valuable personal AI agents across various domains, provided they can precisely follow user instructions. However, recent studies have shown significant limitations in LLMs' instruction-following…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) succeeds in reasoning tasks (e.g., math and code) by checking the final verifiable answer (i.e., a verifiable dot signal). However, extending this paradigm to open-ended generation is…
Preference-based reward learning is widely used for shaping agent behavior to match a user's preference, yet its sparse binary feedback makes it especially vulnerable to causal confusion. The learned reward often latches onto spurious…
Human-designed reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL) agents are frequently misaligned with the humans' true, unobservable objectives, and thus act only as proxies. Optimizing for a misspecified proxy reward function often induces…
In this paper, we observe that current models are susceptible to reward hacking, leading to a substantial overestimation of a model's reasoning ability. This is evidenced by a high incidence of false positives-solutions that reach the…
Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…
Reinforcement learning from human feedback usually models preferences using a reward function that does not distinguish between people. We argue that this is unlikely to be a good design choice in contexts with high potential for…
In reinforcement learning episodes, the rewards and punishments are often non-deterministic, and there are invariably stochastic elements governing the underlying situation. Such stochastic elements are often numerous and cannot be known in…
Reinforcement learning for multi-step reasoning with large language models (LLMs) typically relies on sparse terminal rewards, which creates a poorly conditioned credit-assignment problem: the final feedback is propagated uniformly across…
Post-training has split large language model (LLM) alignment into two largely disconnected tracks. Online reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards drives emergent reasoning on math and code but depends on a programmatic verifier…
We study the model-based undiscounted reinforcement learning for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). The oracle we consider is the optimal policy of the POMDP with a known environment in terms of the average reward over…