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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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , Logan Mondal Bhamidipaty , Emma Brunskill

Reinforcement finetuning (RFT) has shown great potential for enhancing the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but it is often sample- and compute-inefficient, requiring extensive training. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Taiwei Shi , Yiyang Wu , Linxin Song , Tianyi Zhou , Jieyu Zhao

The theory of reinforcement learning has focused on two fundamental problems: achieving low regret, and identifying $\epsilon$-optimal policies. While a simple reduction allows one to apply a low-regret algorithm to obtain an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Andrew Wagenmaker , Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) aligns language models to human preferences by employing a singular reward model derived from preference data. However, such an approach overlooks the rich diversity of human preferences…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Souradip Chakraborty , Jiahao Qiu , Hui Yuan , Alec Koppel , Furong Huang , Dinesh Manocha , Amrit Singh Bedi , Mengdi Wang

Approachability has become a standard tool in analyzing earning algorithms in the adversarial online learning setup. We develop a variant of approachability for games where there is ambiguity in the obtained reward that belongs to a set,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-02-17 Shie Mannor , Vianney Perchet , Gilles Stoltz

Existing studies on provably efficient algorithms for Markov games (MGs) almost exclusively build on the "optimism in the face of uncertainty" (OFU) principle. This work focuses on a different approach of posterior sampling, which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Wei Xiong , Han Zhong , Chengshuai Shi , Cong Shen , Tong Zhang

Regret minimization has played a key role in online learning, equilibrium computation in games, and reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we describe a general model-free RL method for no-regret learning based on repeated…

We study the $K$-armed contextual dueling bandit problem, a sequential decision making setting in which the learner uses contextual information to make two decisions, but only observes \emph{preference-based feedback} suggesting that one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Aadirupa Saha , Akshay Krishnamurthy

We study a stochastic bandit algorithm motivated by retry-aware objectives that value the best outcome among multiple attempts, such as pass@$k$ and max@$k$. Given a posterior over arm values, ReMax chooses a sampling distribution that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Bingkui Tong , Junpei Komiyama , Soichiro Nishimori , Paavo Parmas

We consider the regret minimization problem in reinforcement learning (RL) in the episodic setting. In many real-world RL environments, the state and action spaces are continuous or very large. Existing approaches establish regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-29 Sayak Ray Chowdhury , Rafael Oliveira

We propose a simple model selection approach for algorithms in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. As opposed to prior work that (implicitly) assumes knowledge of the optimal regret, we only require that each base…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Aldo Pacchiano , Christoph Dann , Claudio Gentile , Peter Bartlett

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Guanlin Liu , Zhihan Zhou , Han Liu , Lifeng Lai

Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) has proven to be an effective query reformulation technique to improve retrieval accuracy. It aims to alleviate the mismatch of linguistic expressions between a query and its potential relevant documents.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Yunchang Zhu , Liang Pang , Yanyan Lan , Huawei Shen , Xueqi Cheng

Combining machine learning and constrained optimization, Predict+Optimize tackles optimization problems containing parameters that are unknown at the time of solving. Prior works focus on cases with unknowns only in the objectives. A new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-14 Xinyi Hu , Jasper C. H. Lee , Jimmy H. M. Lee

We study linear bandits when the underlying reward function is not linear. Existing work relies on a uniform misspecification parameter $\epsilon$ that measures the sup-norm error of the best linear approximation. This results in an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Chong Liu , Ming Yin , Yu-Xiang Wang

Meta reinforcement learning (meta RL), as a combination of meta-learning ideas and reinforcement learning (RL), enables the agent to adapt to different tasks using a few samples. However, this sampling-based adaptation also makes meta RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Tao Li , Haozhe Lei , Quanyan Zhu

Reward function is essential in reinforcement learning (RL), serving as the guiding signal to incentivize agents to solve given tasks, however, is also notoriously difficult to design. In many cases, only imperfect rewards are available,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jianxiong Li , Xiao Hu , Haoran Xu , Jingjing Liu , Xianyuan Zhan , Qing-Shan Jia , Ya-Qin Zhang

Driven by recent successes in two-player, zero-sum game solving and playing, artificial intelligence work on games has increasingly focused on algorithms that produce equilibrium-based strategies. However, this approach has been less…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Dustin Morrill , Ryan D'Orazio , Reca Sarfati , Marc Lanctot , James R. Wright , Amy Greenwald , Michael Bowling

This is a short communication on a Lyapunov function argument for softmax in bandit problems. There are a number of excellent papers coming out using differential equations for policy gradient algorithms in reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-21 Neil Walton

An important problem in sequential decision-making under uncertainty is to use limited data to compute a safe policy, i.e., a policy that is guaranteed to perform at least as well as a given baseline strategy. In this paper, we develop and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-07-14 Marek Petrik , Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh