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Reinforcement learning (RL) enhanced large language models (LLMs), particularly exemplified by DeepSeek-R1, have exhibited outstanding performance. Despite the effectiveness in improving LLM capabilities, its implementation remains highly…
It is quite common in modern research, for a researcher to test many hypotheses. The statistical (frequentist) hypothesis testing framework, does not scale with the number of hypotheses in the sense that naively performing many hypothesis…
Novel reinforcement learning algorithms, or improvements on existing ones, are commonly justified by evaluating their performance on benchmark environments and are compared to an ever-changing set of standard algorithms. However, despite…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has a rich history in neuroscience, from early work on dopamine as a reward prediction error signal (Schultz et al., 1997) to recent work proposing that the brain could implement a form of 'distributional…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to follow instructions with various constraints. Despite the encouraging results, RL improvement inevitably relies on sampling successful, high-quality…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a learning paradigm in which the agent learns from its environment through trial and error. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms represent the agent's policies using neural networks, making their…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are often categorized as either on-policy or off-policy depending on whether they use data from a target policy of interest or from a different behavior policy. In this paper, we study a subtle…
Reinforcement learning with outcome-based feedback faces a fundamental challenge: when rewards are only observed at trajectory endpoints, how do we assign credit to the right actions? This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for data science decision-making but suffers from sample inefficiency, particularly in real-world scenarios with costly physical interactions. This paper introduces a novel human-inspired framework to…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms interact with their environment in a trial-and-error fashion. Such interactions can be expensive, inefficient, and timely when learning on a physical system rather than in a simulation. This work…
Through many recent successes in simulation, model-free reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising approach to solving continuous control robotic tasks. The research community is now able to reproduce, analyze and build quickly on…
This paper studies convergence of empirical risks in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS). A conventional assumption in the existing research is that empirical training data do not contain any noise but this may not be satisfied in some…
Specifying a Reinforcement Learning (RL) task involves choosing a suitable planning horizon, which is typically modeled by a discount factor. It is known that applying RL algorithms with a lower discount factor can act as a regularizer,…
Ensuring the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is crucial to unlock their potential for many real-world tasks. However, vanilla RL and most safe RL approaches do not guarantee safety. In recent years, several methods have…
Studying the reliability of complex systems using machine learning techniques involves facing a series of technical and practical challenges, ranging from the intrinsic nature of the system and data to the difficulties in modeling and…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn optimal decisions in unknown environments through experience of taking actions and observing the rewards gained. In some cases, the environment is not influenced by the actions of the RL…
We introduce a method to verify stochastic reinforcement learning (RL) policies. This approach is compatible with any RL algorithm as long as the algorithm and its corresponding environment collectively adhere to the Markov property. In…
We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL…
Safety-critical robot systems need thorough testing to expose design flaws and software bugs which could endanger humans. Testing in simulation is becoming increasingly popular, as it can be applied early in the development process and does…
Benchmarking and establishing proper statistical validation metrics for reinforcement learning (RL) remain ongoing challenges, where no consensus has been established yet. The emergence of quantum computing and its potential applications in…