Related papers: Exponential Smoothing for Off-Policy Learning
On-policy reinforcement learning has become the dominant paradigm for reasoning alignment in large language models, yet its sparse, outcome-level rewards make token-level credit assignment notoriously difficult. On-Policy Distillation (OPD)…
The goal of off-policy evaluation (OPE) is to evaluate a new policy using historical data obtained via a behavior policy. However, because the contextual bandit algorithm updates the policy based on past observations, the samples are not…
We derive explicit non-asymptotic PAC-Bayes generalization bounds for Gibbs posteriors, that is, data-dependent distributions over model parameters obtained by exponentially tilting a prior with the empirical risk. Unlike classical…
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…
We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning (RL), where the goal is to estimate the performance of a policy from the data generated by another policy(ies). In particular, we focus on the doubly robust (DR)…
Most prior approaches to offline reinforcement learning (RL) utilize \textit{behavior regularization}, typically augmenting existing off-policy actor critic algorithms with a penalty measuring divergence between the policy and the offline…
We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits with finite action space. Inverse Propensity Score (IPS) weighting is a widely used method for OPE due to its unbiased, but it suffers from significant variance when the action…
Many offline reinforcement learning algorithms are underpinned by $f$-divergence regularization, but their sample complexity *defined with respect to regularized objectives* still lacks tight analyses, especially in terms of concrete data…
In interactive systems, actions are often correlated, presenting an opportunity for more sample-efficient off-policy evaluation (OPE) and learning (OPL) in large action spaces. We introduce a unified Bayesian framework to capture these…
Primal-dual safe RL methods commonly perform iterations between the primal update of the policy and the dual update of the Lagrange Multiplier. Such a training paradigm is highly susceptible to the error in cumulative cost estimation since…
We consider estimation of a linear functional of the treatment effect using adaptively collected data. This task finds a variety of applications including the off-policy evaluation (\textsf{OPE}) in contextual bandits, and estimation of the…
A key problem in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the mismatch, or distribution shift, between the dataset and the distribution over states and actions visited by the learned policy. This problem is exacerbated in the fully offline…
Preference learning from pairwise feedback is a widely adopted framework in applications such as reinforcement learning with human feedback and recommendations. In many practical settings, however, user interactions are limited or costly,…
Offline policy optimization could have a large impact on many real-world decision-making problems, as online learning may be infeasible in many applications. Importance sampling and its variants are a commonly used type of estimator in…
Recently, the study of linear misspecified bandits has generated intriguing implications of the hardness of learning in bandits and reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, Du et al. (2020) show that even if a learner is given linear…
Online mirror descent (OMD) is a fundamental algorithmic paradigm that underlies many algorithms in optimization, machine learning and sequential decision-making. The OMD iterates are defined as solutions to optimization subproblems which,…
A major bottleneck in the real-world applications of machine learning models is their failure in generalizing to unseen domains whose data distribution is not i.i.d to the training domains. This failure often stems from learning…
Sparse regularization is a central technique for both machine learning (to achieve supervised features selection or unsupervised mixture learning) and imaging sciences (to achieve super-resolution). Existing performance guaranties assume a…
Underdetermined or ill-posed inverse problems require additional information for \ldd{d} sound solutions with tractable optimization algorithms. Sparsity yields consequent heuristics to that matter, with numerous applications in signal…
On-Policy Distillation (OPD) has gained wide attraction as an LLM post-training paradigm due to its effectiveness in improving capabilities without introducing model distribution drift, and consequently, regression in general tasks.…