Related papers: Efficient Exploration of Gradient Space for Online…
LEarning TO Rank (LETOR) is a research area in the field of Information Retrieval (IR) where machine learning models are employed to rank a set of items. In the past few years, neural LETOR approaches have become a competitive alternative…
Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) improves sample efficiency by leveraging pre-collected datasets prior to online interaction. A key challenge, however, is learning an accurate critic in large state--action spaces with limited…
Scaling inference-time compute for Large Language Models (LLMs) has unlocked unprecedented reasoning capabilities. However, existing inference-time scaling methods typically rely on inefficient and suboptimal discrete search algorithms or…
We revisit the question of reducing online learning to approximate optimization of the offline problem. In this setting, we give two algorithms with near-optimal performance in the full information setting: they guarantee optimal regret and…
In recent years, deep neural networks demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in a large variety of tasks and therefore have been adopted in many applications. On the other hand, the latest studies revealed that neural networks are…
On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated great potential in robotic control, where effective exploration is crucial for efficient and high-quality policy learning. However, how to encourage the agent to explore the…
The implicit biases of gradient-based optimization algorithms are conjectured to be a major factor in the success of modern deep learning. In this work, we investigate the implicit bias of gradient flow and gradient descent in two-layer…
Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning algorithms to search for better policies in the parameterized policy space. They do gradient search in the policy space and are known to converge very slowly. Nesterov…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a key technique for enhancing LLMs' reasoning abilities, yet its data inefficiency remains a major bottleneck. To address this critical yet challenging issue, we present a…
We propose a simple interpolation-based method for the efficient approximation of gradients in neural ODE models. We compare it with the reverse dynamic method (known in the literature as "adjoint method") to train neural ODEs on…
Imitation learning (IL) is a general learning paradigm for tackling sequential decision-making problems. Interactive imitation learning, where learners can interactively query for expert demonstrations, has been shown to achieve provably…
Training large language models (LLMs) is constrained by memory requirements, with activations accounting for a substantial fraction of the total footprint. Existing approaches reduce memory using low-rank weight parameterizations or…
There is a clear need for efficient algorithms to tune hyperparameters for statistical learning schemes, since the commonly applied search methods (such as grid search with N-fold cross-validation) are inefficient and/or approximate.…
This work considers the problem of decentralized online learning, where the goal is to track the optimum of the sum of time-varying functions, distributed across several nodes in a network. The local availability of the functions and their…
With the advent of large datasets, offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising framework for learning good decision-making policies without the need to interact with the real environment. However, offline RL requires the dataset to…
Mastering deep reinforcement learning (DRL) proves challenging in tasks featuring scant rewards. These limited rewards merely signify whether the task is partially or entirely accomplished, necessitating various exploration actions before…
In this paper, we investigate the power of online learning in stochastic network optimization with unknown system statistics {\it a priori}. We are interested in understanding how information and learning can be efficiently incorporated…
A promising paradigm for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is to constrain the learned policy to stay close to the dataset behaviors, known as policy constraint offline RL. However, existing works heavily rely on the purity of the data,…
In this paper, we study the problem of safe online learning to re-rank, where user feedback is used to improve the quality of displayed lists. Learning to rank has traditionally been studied in two settings. In the offline setting, rankers…
Matrix completion, where we wish to recover a low rank matrix by observing a few entries from it, is a widely studied problem in both theory and practice with wide applications. Most of the provable algorithms so far on this problem have…