Related papers: f-Divergence constrained policy improvement
In deep reinforcement learning, policy optimization methods need to deal with issues such as function approximation and the reuse of off-policy data. Standard policy gradient methods do not handle off-policy data well, leading to premature…
Temporal-difference learning (TD), coupled with neural networks, is among the most fundamental building blocks of deep reinforcement learning. However, due to the nonlinearity in value function approximation, such a coupling leads to…
The powerful cooperation of federated learning (FL) and differential privacy~(DP) provides a promising paradigm for the large-scale private clients. However, existing analyses in FL-DP mostly rely on the composition theorem and cannot…
We consider the fundamental problem of estimating a discrete distribution on a domain of size $K$ with high probability in Kullback-Leibler divergence. We provide upper and lower bounds on the minimax estimation rate, which show that the…
In many real-world settings, reinforcement learning systems suffer performance degradation when the environment encountered at deployment differs from that observed during training. Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL)…
A central paradox in fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) is the frequent degradation of multi-attempt performance (Pass@k) despite improvements in single-attempt accuracy…
We generalise the classical Pinsker inequality which relates variational divergence to Kullback-Liebler divergence in two ways: we consider arbitrary f-divergences in place of KL divergence, and we assume knowledge of a sequence of values…
Diffusion models have achieved great success in generating high-dimensional samples across various applications. While the theoretical guarantees for continuous-state diffusion models have been extensively studied, the convergence analysis…
The analysis of Temporal Difference (TD) learning in the average-reward setting faces notable theoretical difficulties because the Bellman operator is not contractive with respect to any norm. This complicates standard analyses of…
We consider the problem of parameter estimation in a Bayesian setting and propose a general lower-bound that includes part of the family of $f$-Divergences. The results are then applied to specific settings of interest and compared to other…
In this work, the probability of an event under some joint distribution is bounded by measuring it with the product of the marginals instead (which is typically easier to analyze) together with a measure of the dependence between the two…
In this paper, some new upper bounds for Kullback-Leibler divergence(KL-divergence) based on $L^1, L^2$ and $L^\infty$ norms of density functions are discussed. Our findings unveil that the convergence in KL-divergence sense sandwiches…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…
The reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) can be substantially improved by training them with reinforcement learning (RL). The RL objective for LLM training involves a regularization term, which is the reverse…
Kullback-Leiber divergence has been widely used in Knowledge Distillation (KD) to compress Large Language Models (LLMs). Contrary to prior assertions that reverse Kullback-Leibler (RKL) divergence is mode-seeking and thus preferable over…
A stream of algorithmic advances has steadily increased the popularity of the Bayesian approach as an inference paradigm, both from the theoretical and applied perspective. Even with apparent successes in numerous application fields, a…
The increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) raise opportunities for artificial general intelligence but concurrently amplify safety concerns, such as potential misuse of AI systems, necessitating effective AI alignment.…
Knowledge distillation (KD), transferring knowledge from a cumbersome teacher model to a lightweight student model, has been investigated to design efficient neural architectures. Generally, the objective function of KD is the…
In this work we introduce a family of transformations, named \textit{divergence transformations}, interpolating between any pair of probability density functions sharing the same support. We prove the remarkable property that the whole…
Several scalable sample-based methods to compute the Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence between two distributions have been proposed and applied in large-scale machine learning models. While they have been found to be unstable, the…