Related papers: Collect & Infer -- a fresh look at data-efficient …
Providing a suitable reward function to reinforcement learning can be difficult in many real world applications. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) holds promise for automatically learning reward functions from demonstrations,…
Research in machine learning is making progress in fixing its own reproducibility crisis. Reinforcement learning (RL), in particular, faces its own set of unique challenges. Comparison of point estimates, and plots that show successful…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Process-Supervised RL (PSRL) has emerged as a more effective paradigm compared to outcome-based RL. However,…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise as a means to learn high-reward policies from a static dataset, without the need for further environment interactions. However, a key challenge in offline RL lies in effectively stitching…
The offline reinforcement learning (RL) setting (also known as full batch RL), where a policy is learned from a static dataset, is compelling as progress enables RL methods to take advantage of large, previously-collected datasets, much…
While Experience Replay - the practice of storing rollouts and reusing them multiple times during training - is a foundational technique in general RL, it remains largely unexplored in LLM post-training due to the prevailing belief that…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) and dynamic discrete choice (DDC) models explain sequential decision-making by recovering reward functions that rationalize observed behavior. Flexible IRL methods typically rely on machine learning but…
This paper investigates a hybrid learning framework for reinforcement learning (RL) in which the agent can leverage both an offline dataset and online interactions to learn the optimal policy. We present a unified algorithm and analysis and…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is a promising approach for adaptive robot control, but its current application to robotics is currently hindered by high sample requirements. We propose two novel data augmentation techniques for DRL in…
A major challenge of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world applications is the variation between environments, tasks or clients. Meta-RL (MRL) addresses this issue by learning a meta-policy that adapts to new tasks. Standard MRL methods…
Reliant on too many experiments to learn good actions, current Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have limited applicability in real-world settings, which can be too expensive to allow exploration. We propose an algorithm for batch RL,…
Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) -- the problem of learning reward functions from demonstrations of an \emph{expert policy} -- plays a critical role in developing intelligent systems. While widely used in applications, theoretical…
From a first-principles perspective, it may seem odd that the strongest results in foundation model fine-tuning (FT) are achieved via a relatively complex, two-stage training procedure. Specifically, one first trains a reward model (RM) on…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a promising approach to avoid costly online interaction with the real environment. However, the performance of offline RL highly depends on the quality of the datasets, which may cause…
Passive observational data, such as human videos, is abundant and rich in information, yet remains largely untapped by current RL methods. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that passive data, despite not having reward or action labels, can…
Transfer Learning (TL) has shown great potential to accelerate Reinforcement Learning (RL) by leveraging prior knowledge from past learned policies of relevant tasks. Existing transfer approaches either explicitly computes the similarity…
We give an overview of recent exciting achievements of deep reinforcement learning (RL). We discuss six core elements, six important mechanisms, and twelve applications. We start with background of machine learning, deep learning and…
Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) generally suffers from poor sample complexity, mostly due to the need to exhaustively explore the state-action space to find well-performing policies. On the other hand, we postulate that expert…
This thesis rigorously studies fundamental reinforcement learning (RL) methods in modern practical considerations, including robust RL, distributional RL, and offline RL with neural function approximation. The thesis first prepares the…
Reinforcement learning (RL) provides an appealing formalism for learning control policies from experience. However, the classic active formulation of RL necessitates a lengthy active exploration process for each behavior, making it…