Related papers: Exponential Smoothing for Off-Policy Learning

We study an approach to learning pruning masks by optimizing the expected loss of stochastic pruning masks, i.e., masks which zero out each weight independently with some weight-specific probability. We analyze the training dynamics of the…

Randomized smoothing is the dominant standard for provable defenses against adversarial examples. Nevertheless, this method has recently been proven to suffer from important information theoretic limitations. In this paper, we argue that…

Adversarial Imitation Learning (AIL) faces challenges with sample inefficiency because of its reliance on sufficient on-policy data to evaluate the performance of the current policy during reward function updates. In this work, we study the…

We study offline reinforcement learning in average-reward MDPs, which presents increased challenges from the perspectives of distribution shift and non-uniform coverage, and has been relatively underexamined from a theoretical perspective.…

We study the efficient off-policy evaluation of natural stochastic policies, which are defined in terms of deviations from the behavior policy. This is a departure from the literature on off-policy evaluation where most work consider the…

We are motivated by the problem of providing strong generalization guarantees in the context of meta-learning. Existing generalization bounds are either challenging to evaluate or provide vacuous guarantees in even relatively simple…

Importance sampling (IS) represents a fundamental technique for a large surge of off-policy reinforcement learning approaches. Policy gradient (PG) methods, in particular, significantly benefit from IS, enabling the effective reuse of…

Estimating optimal individualized treatment rules (ITRs) via outcome weighted learning (OWL) often relies on observed rewards that are noisy or optimistic proxies for the true latent utility. Ignoring this reward uncertainty leads to the…

Recent advances in end-to-end autonomous driving show that policies trained on patch-aligned features extracted from foundation models generalize better to Out-of-Distribution (OOD). We hypothesize that due to the self-attention mechanism,…

Deep reinforcement learning has been able to solve various tasks successfully, however, due to the construction of policy gradient and training dynamics, tuning deep reinforcement learning models remains challenging. As one of the most…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is essential for assessing ranking and recommendation systems without costly online interventions. Self-Normalised Inverse Propensity Scoring (SNIPS) is a standard tool for variance reduction in OPE, leveraging a…

On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student on its own trajectories with token-level teacher feedback and often outperforms off-policy distillation and standard reinforcement learning. However, we find that its standard advantage weighted…

Offline policy learning aims to use historical data to learn an optimal personalized decision rule. In the standard estimate-then-optimize framework, reweighting-based methods (e.g., inverse propensity weighting or doubly robust estimators)…

We present a Bayesian view of counterfactual risk minimization (CRM) for offline learning from logged bandit feedback. Using PAC-Bayesian analysis, we derive a new generalization bound for the truncated inverse propensity score estimator.…

Self-paced learning (SPL) is a new methodology that simulates the learning principle of humans/animals to start learning easier aspects of a learning task, and then gradually take more complex examples into training. This new-coming…

Personalized preference alignment for LLMs with diverse human preferences requires evaluation and alignment methods that capture pluralism. Most existing preference alignment datasets are logged under policies that differ substantially from…

Safe Reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims at learning optimal policies while staying safe. A popular solution to Safe RL is shielding, which uses a logical safety specification to prevent an RL agent from taking unsafe actions. However,…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs). Off-policy methods offer greater implementation simplicity and data efficiency than on-policy techniques, but often result in suboptimal performance. In…

Recent advances in robust semi-supervised learning (SSL) typically filter out-of-distribution (OOD) information at the sample level. We argue that an overlooked problem of robust SSL is its corrupted information on semantic level,…

Off-policy learning exhibits greater instability when compared to on-policy learning in reinforcement learning (RL). The difference in probability distribution between the target policy ($\pi$) and the behavior policy (b) is a major cause…