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Generalization in Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn an agent during training that generalizes to the target environment. This paper studies RL generalization from a theoretical aspect: how much can we expect pre-training over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-30 Haotian Ye , Xiaoyu Chen , Liwei Wang , Simon S. Du

Data efficiency is a key challenge for deep reinforcement learning. We address this problem by using unlabeled data to pretrain an encoder which is then finetuned on a small amount of task-specific data. To encourage learning…

Large language models are classically trained in stages: pretraining on raw text followed by post-training for instruction following and reasoning. However, this separation creates a fundamental limitation: many desirable behaviors such as…

Pretraining with expert demonstrations have been found useful in speeding up the training process of deep reinforcement learning algorithms since less online simulation data is required. Some people use supervised learning to speed up the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-12 Xiaoqin Zhang , Huimin Ma

The recent success of supervised learning methods on ever larger offline datasets has spurred interest in the reinforcement learning (RL) field to investigate whether the same paradigms can be translated to RL algorithms. This research…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Mengjiao Yang , Ofir Nachum

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms hold the promise of enabling autonomous skill acquisition for robotic systems. However, in practice, real-world robotic RL typically requires time consuming data collection and frequent human…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Homer Walke , Jonathan Yang , Albert Yu , Aviral Kumar , Jedrzej Orbik , Avi Singh , Sergey Levine

Pretraining reinforcement learning (RL) models on offline datasets is a promising way to improve their training efficiency in online tasks, but challenging due to the inherent mismatch in dynamics and behaviors across various tasks. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Minting Pan , Yitao Zheng , Yunbo Wang , Xiaokang Yang

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms are known to be data inefficient. One reason is that a DRL agent learns both the feature and the policy tabula rasa. Integrating prior knowledge into DRL algorithms is one way to improve learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-05 Gabriel V. de la Cruz , Yunshu Du , Matthew E. Taylor

For most natural language processing tasks, the dominant practice is to finetune large pretrained transformer models (e.g., BERT) using smaller downstream datasets. Despite the success of this approach, it remains unclear to what extent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Kundan Krishna , Saurabh Garg , Jeffrey P. Bigham , Zachary C. Lipton

Fine-tuning of pre-trained deep nets is commonly used to improve accuracies and training times for neural nets. It is generally assumed that pre-training a net for optimal source task performance best prepares it for fine-tuning to learn an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-13 Steven Gutstein , Brent Lance , Sanjay Shakkottai

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents are trained through trial-and-error interactions with the environment. This leads to a long training time for dense neural networks to achieve good performance. Hence, prohibitive computation and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-09 Ghada Sokar , Elena Mocanu , Decebal Constantin Mocanu , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Peter Stone

Executing workflows on volunteer computing resources where individual tasks may be forced to relinquish their resource for the resource's primary use leads to unpredictability and often significantly increases execution time. Task…

Performance · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Andrew Stephen McGough , Matthew Forshaw

Everything else being equal, simpler models should be preferred over more complex ones. In reinforcement learning (RL), simplicity is typically quantified on an action-by-action basis -- but this timescale ignores temporal regularities,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Tankred Saanum , Noémi Éltető , Peter Dayan , Marcel Binz , Eric Schulz

The modern paradigm in machine learning involves pre-training on diverse data, followed by task-specific fine-tuning. In reinforcement learning (RL), this translates to learning via offline RL on a diverse historical dataset, followed by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Zhiyuan Zhou , Andy Peng , Qiyang Li , Sergey Levine , Aviral Kumar

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key post-pretraining step for aligning large language models (LLMs) with complex tasks and human preferences. While it is often assumed that RL fine-tuning requires updating most of a model's parameters, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Andrii Balashov

The success of deep learning in the computer vision and natural language processing communities can be attributed to training of very deep neural networks with millions or billions of parameters which can then be trained with massive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-17 Kei Ota , Devesh K. Jha , Asako Kanezaki

Pre-training has marked numerous state of the arts in high-level computer vision, while few attempts have ever been made to investigate how pre-training acts in image processing systems. In this paper, we tailor transformer-based…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Wenbo Li , Xin Lu , Shengju Qian , Jiangbo Lu , Xiangyu Zhang , Jiaya Jia

Neural network pruning is useful for discovering efficient, high-performing subnetworks within pre-trained, dense network architectures. More often than not, it involves a three-step process -- pre-training, pruning, and re-training -- that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-08-24 Cameron R. Wolfe , Fangshuo Liao , Qihan Wang , Junhyung Lyle Kim , Anastasios Kyrillidis

Training a deep neural network to maximize a target objective has become the standard recipe for successful machine learning over the last decade. These networks can be optimized with supervised learning, if the target objective is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Bernhard Jaeger , Andreas Geiger

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning has become a crucial step in post-training language models for advanced mathematical reasoning and coding. Following the success of frontier reasoning models, recent work has demonstrated that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Rosie Zhao , Alexandru Meterez , Sham Kakade , Cengiz Pehlevan , Samy Jelassi , Eran Malach