Related papers: You May Not Need Ratio Clipping in PPO
We propose a new sample-efficient methodology, called Supervised Policy Update (SPU), for deep reinforcement learning. Starting with data generated by the current policy, SPU formulates and solves a constrained optimization problem in the…
We study differentially private (DP) algorithms for stochastic convex optimization (SCO). In this problem the goal is to approximately minimize the population loss given i.i.d. samples from a distribution over convex and Lipschitz loss…
Stochastic computer simulations enable users to gain new insights into complex physical systems. Optimization is a common problem in this context: users seek to find model inputs that maximize the expected value of an objective function.…
Policy gradient algorithms have driven many recent advancements in language model reasoning. An appealing property is their ability to learn from exploration on their own trajectories, a process crucial for fostering diverse and creative…
Policy optimization is among the most popular and successful reinforcement learning algorithms, and there is increasing interest in understanding its theoretical guarantees. In this work, we initiate the study of policy optimization for the…
Existing post-training techniques are broadly categorized into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) methods; the former is stable during training but suffers from limited generalization, while the latter, despite its…
Traditional RL algorithms like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) typically train on the entire rollout buffer, operating under the assumption that all generated episodes provide a beneficial optimization signal. However, these episodes…
Most provably-efficient learning algorithms introduce optimism about poorly-understood states and actions to encourage exploration. We study an alternative approach for efficient exploration, posterior sampling for reinforcement learning…
Existing reinforcement learning approaches for Large Language Models typically perform policy optimization at the granularity of individual tokens or entire response sequences. However, such formulations often misalign with the natural…
Early stopping is a well known approach to reduce the time complexity for performing training and model selection of large scale learning machines. On the other hand, memory/space (rather than time) complexity is the main constraint in many…
For many applications of reinforcement learning it can be more convenient to specify both a reward function and constraints, rather than trying to design behavior through the reward function. For example, systems that physically interact…
Policy gradient methods usually rely on entropy regularization to prevent premature convergence. However, maximizing entropy indiscriminately pushes the policy towards a uniform distribution, often overriding the reward signal if not…
Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning has emerged as a powerful approach for aligning diffusion models with black-box objectives. Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is a popular choice of method for policy optimization. While…
Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO) enhances large language models by estimating advantages across a group of sampled trajectories. However, mapping these trajectory-level advantages to policy updates requires aggregating token-level…
Policy optimization for large language models often suffers from sparse reward signals in multi-step reasoning tasks. Critic-free methods like GRPO assign a single normalized outcome reward to all tokens, providing limited guidance for…
In this paper, we propose a sparse equity portfolio optimization (SEPO) based on the mean-variance portfolio selection model. Aimed at minimizing transaction cost by avoiding small investments, this new model includes $\ell_0$-norm…
Solving tasks in Reinforcement Learning is no easy feat. As the goal of the agent is to maximize the accumulated reward, it often learns to exploit loopholes and misspecifications in the reward signal resulting in unwanted behavior. While…
Preference optimization (PO) is indispensable for large language models (LLMs), with methods such as direct preference optimization (DPO) and proximal policy optimization (PPO) achieving great success. A common belief is that DPO is…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved great success across diverse tasks, and fine-tuning is sometimes needed to further enhance generation quality. Most existing methods rely on human supervision or parameter retraining, both of which…
There has been a growing interest in off-policy evaluation in the literature such as recommender systems and personalized medicine. We have so far seen significant progress in developing estimators aimed at accurately estimating the…