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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…
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…
In China's competitive fresh e-commerce market, optimizing operational strategies, especially inventory management in front-end warehouses, is key to enhance customer satisfaction and to gain a competitive edge. Front-end warehouses are…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) dominates reinforcement learning and LLM alignment but relies on a "hard clipping" mechanism that discards valuable gradients. Conversely, unconstrained methods like SPO expose the optimization to…
Many real-world decision processes are modeled by optimization problems whose defining parameters are unknown and must be inferred from observable data. The Predict-Then-Optimize framework uses machine learning models to predict unknown…
Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) has gained significant attention due to the potential of deep learning to efficiently solve combinatorial optimization problems. NCO has been widely applied to job shop scheduling problems (JSPs) with…
Preferential Bayesian optimization (PBO) is a variant of Bayesian optimization that observes relative preferences (e.g., pairwise comparisons) instead of direct objective values, making it especially suitable for human-in-the-loop…
Self-improvement has emerged as a state-of-the-art paradigm in Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO), where models iteratively refine their policies by generating and imitating high-quality solutions. Despite strong empirical performance,…
In real-world recommendation scenarios, users engage with items through various types of behaviors. Leveraging diversified user behavior information for learning can enhance the recommendation of target behaviors (e.g., buy), as…
Lead optimization in drug discovery requires efficiently navigating vast chemical space through iterative cycles to enhance molecular properties while preserving structural similarity to the original lead compound. Despite recent advances,…
Many machine learning (ML) models are integrated within the context of a larger system as part of a key component for decision making processes. Concretely, predictive models are often employed in estimating the parameters for the input…
Predictive models are often introduced to decision-making tasks under the rationale that they improve performance over an existing decision-making policy. However, it is challenging to compare predictive performance against an existing…
Combinatorial optimization (CO) layers in machine learning (ML) pipelines are a powerful tool to tackle data-driven decision tasks, but they come with two main challenges. First, the solution of a CO problem often behaves as a piecewise…
Neural network pruning can be formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem, yet most existing approaches rely on greedy heuristics that ignore complex interactions between filters. Formal optimization methods such as Quadratic…
Bandit Convex Optimization (BCO) is a fundamental framework for modeling sequential decision-making with partial information, where the only feedback available to the player is the one-point or two-point function values. In this paper, we…
Traditionally, prediction and planning in autonomous driving (AD) have been treated as separate, sequential modules. Recently, there has been a growing shift towards tighter integration of these components, known as Integrated Prediction…
Combinatorial optimization (CO) problems, central to operation research and theoretical computer science, present significant computational challenges due to their NP-hard nature. While large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising…
Combinatorial optimization (CO) problems are often NP-hard and thus out of reach for exact algorithms, making them a tempting domain to apply machine learning methods. The highly structured constraints in these problems can hinder either…
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants have become the de facto standards for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences or specific goals. However, DPO requires high-quality preference data and suffers from…
Contextual optimization, also known as predict-then-optimize or prescriptive analytics, considers an optimization problem with the presence of covariates (context or side information). The goal is to learn a prediction model (from the…