Related papers: Nearly Optimal Policy Optimization with Stable at …
RL-based post-training of language models is almost exclusively done using on-policy methods such as PPO. These methods cannot learn from arbitrary sequences such as those produced earlier in training, in earlier runs, by human experts or…
Reinforcement Learning, particularly through policy gradient methods, has played a central role in enabling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, the optimization stability of policy gradients in this setting remains…
Sparse continuous policies are distributions that can choose some actions at random yet keep strictly zero probability for the other actions, which are radically different from the Gaussian. They have important real-world implications, e.g.…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising paradigm for post-training reasoning models. However, group-based methods such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) face a critical dilemma in…
Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most popular deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of challenging tasks. However, as a model-free RL method, the success of PPO…
Among the reasons hindering reinforcement learning (RL) applications to real-world problems, two factors are critical: limited data and the mismatch between the testing environment (real environment in which the policy is deployed) and the…
We consider the problem of reinforcement learning (RL) with unbounded state space motivated by the classical problem of scheduling in a queueing network. Traditional policies as well as error metric that are designed for finite, bounded or…
POMDPs are standard models for probabilistic planning problems, where an agent interacts with an uncertain environment. We study the problem of almost-sure reachability, where given a set of target states, the question is to decide whether…
Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is typically enforced through objective shaping while keeping environment dynamics stationary with respect to observable state-action pairs. Under delayed harm, this can lead to replay: after a washout…
One of the most natural approaches to reinforcement learning (RL) with function approximation is value iteration, which inductively generates approximations to the optimal value function by solving a sequence of regression problems. To…
Batch policy optimization considers leveraging existing data for policy construction before interacting with an environment. Although interest in this problem has grown significantly in recent years, its theoretical foundations remain…
Policy optimization methods are popular reinforcement learning algorithms in practice. Recent works have built theoretical foundation for them by proving $\sqrt{T}$ regret bounds even when the losses are adversarial. Such bounds are tight…
Learning control policies for complex, long-horizon tasks is a central challenge in robotics and autonomous systems. Signal Temporal Logic (STL) offers a powerful and expressive language for specifying such tasks, but its non-Markovian…
Language model alignment methods such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) have led to impressive advances in language model capabilities, but are limited by a widely observed phenomenon known as overoptimization, where the…
We propose a computationally efficient algorithm that achieves anytime regret of order $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{t})$, with explicit dependence on the system dimensions and on the solution of the Discrete Algebraic Riccati Equation (DARE). Our…
We study computationally and statistically efficient reinforcement learning under the linear $Q^{\pi}$ realizability assumption, where any policy's $Q$-function is linear in a given state-action feature representation. Prior methods in this…
Reinforcement learning (RL) plays an increasingly important role in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet stable and performant policy optimization remains challenging. Token-level importance ratios often…
Policy constraint methods to offline reinforcement learning (RL) typically utilize parameterization or regularization that constrains the policy to perform actions within the support set of the behavior policy. The elaborative designs of…
Distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL), which seeks robust policy training against environment perturbation by modeling dynamics uncertainty, calls for function approximations when facing large state-action spaces.…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…