Related papers: f-Divergence constrained policy improvement
We study the problem of computing the value function from a discretely-observed trajectory of a continuous-time diffusion process. We develop a new class of algorithms based on easily implementable numerical schemes that are compatible with…
The capability of a novel Kullback-Leibler divergence method is examined herein within the Kalman filter framework to select the input-parameter-state estimation execution with the most plausible results. This identification suffers from…
In temporal difference (TD) learning, off-policy sampling is known to be more practical than on-policy sampling, and by decoupling learning from data collection, it enables data reuse. It is known that policy evaluation (including…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained attention for aligning large language models (LLMs) via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The actor-only variants of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are widely applied for their…
This paper develops systematic approaches to obtain $f$-divergence inequalities, dealing with pairs of probability measures defined on arbitrary alphabets. Functional domination is one such approach, where special emphasis is placed on…
The improvement in the performance of efficient and lightweight models (i.e., the student model) is achieved through knowledge distillation (KD), which involves transferring knowledge from more complex models (i.e., the teacher model).…
We consider a standard federated learning (FL) architecture where a group of clients periodically coordinate with a central server to train a statistical model. We develop a general algorithmic framework called FedLin to tackle some of the…
Off-policy learning ability is an important feature of reinforcement learning (RL) for practical applications. However, even one of the most elementary RL algorithms, temporal-difference (TD) learning, is known to suffer form divergence…
Obtaining an accurate estimate of the underlying covariance matrix from finite sample size data is challenging due to sample size noise. In recent years, sophisticated covariance-cleaning techniques based on random matrix theory have been…
Distributed training and increasing the gradient update frequency are practical strategies to accelerate learning and improve performance, but both exacerbate a central challenge: \textit{policy lag}, which is the mismatch between the…
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) was introduced and used recently for promoting reasoning in LLMs under verifiable (binary) rewards. We show that the mean + variance calibration of these rewards induces a weighted contrastive loss…
Density ratio estimation (DRE) is a fundamental machine learning technique for capturing relationships between two probability distributions. State-of-the-art DRE methods estimate the density ratio using neural networks trained with loss…
In practice, many machine learning (ML) problems come with constraints, and their applied domains involve distributed sensitive data that cannot be shared with others, e.g., in healthcare. Collaborative learning in such practical scenarios…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard approach for improving reasoning in language models, yet models trained with RLVR often suffer from diversity collapse: while single-sample accuracy improves,…
Trust region methods are a popular tool in reinforcement learning as they yield robust policy updates in continuous and discrete action spaces. However, enforcing such trust regions in deep reinforcement learning is difficult. Hence, many…
Federated learning is a contemporary machine learning paradigm where locally trained models are distilled into a global model. Due to the intrinsic permutation invariance of neural networks, Probabilistic Federated Neural Matching (PFNM)…
Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are among the most successful policy gradient approaches in deep reinforcement learning (RL). While these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across a…
Meta-learning aims at optimizing the hyperparameters of a model class or training algorithm from the observation of data from a number of related tasks. Following the setting of Baxter [1], the tasks are assumed to belong to the same task…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive capabilities, yet ensuring their safety against harmful prompts remains a critical challenge. Recent work has revealed that the latent representations (embeddings) of harmful and safe…
Wasserstein policy gradient (WPG) is a policy optimization method for reinforcement learning (RL) that exploits the optimal-transport geometry of action distributions. For the entropy-regularized RL objective, WPG evolves each…