Related papers: Sample Complexity of Preference-Based Nonparametri…

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) provides a principled framework for aligning AI systems with human preference data. For various reasons, e.g., personal bias, context ambiguity, lack of training, etc, human annotators may…

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful technique to make large language models (LLMs) easier to use and more effective. A core piece of the RLHF process is the training and utilization of a model of…

Motivated by the many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) that require safe-policy iterations, we consider the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) -- the problem of evaluating a new policy using the historical data…

Reward functions are difficult to design and often hard to align with human intent. Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms address these problems by learning reward functions from human feedback. However, the majority of…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is currently the leading approach for aligning large language models with human preferences. Typically, these models rely on extensive offline preference datasets for training. However,…

Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently use on-policy algorithms, such as PPO or GRPO. However, policy lag from distributed training architectures and differences between the training and inference…

Meta-reinforcement learning (RL) addresses the problem of sample inefficiency in deep RL by using experience obtained in past tasks for a new task to be solved. However, most meta-RL methods require partially or fully on-policy data, i.e.,…

Evaluating a policy by deploying it in the real world can be risky and costly. Off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) algorithms use historical data collected from running a previous policy to evaluate a new policy, which provides a means for…

We study the problem of off-policy critic evaluation in several variants of value-based off-policy actor-critic algorithms. Off-policy actor-critic algorithms require an off-policy critic evaluation step, to estimate the value of the new…

This work focuses on off-policy evaluation (OPE) with function approximation in infinite-horizon undiscounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). For MDPs that are ergodic and linear (i.e. where rewards and dynamics are linear in some known…

Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…

Offline reinforcement learning algorithms often require careful hyperparameter tuning. Before deployment, we need to select amongst a set of candidate policies. However, there is limited understanding about the fundamental limits of this…

In reinforcement learning, distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE) focuses on estimating the return distribution of a target policy using offline data collected under a different policy. This work focuses on extending the widely used…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a pivotal paradigm in artificial intelligence to align large models with human preferences. In this paper, we propose a novel statistical framework to simultaneously conduct the…

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) constructs confidence intervals for the value of a target policy using data generated under a different behavior policy. Most existing inference methods focus on fixed target policies and may fail when the target…

Reinforcement Learning algorithms that learn from human feedback (RLHF) need to be efficient in terms of statistical complexity, computational complexity, and query complexity. In this work, we consider the RLHF setting where the feedback…

While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing…

Reinforcement learning is a general method for learning in sequential settings, but it can often be difficult to specify a good reward function when the task is complex. In these cases, preference feedback or expert demonstrations can be…

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience,…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) from Human Preference-based feedback is a popular paradigm for fine-tuning generative models, which has produced impressive models such as GPT-4 and Claude3 Opus. This framework often consists of two steps:…