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We propose a new approach to solving dynamic decision problems with unbounded rewards based on the transformations used in Q-learning. In our case, the objective of the transform is to convert an unbounded dynamic program into a bounded…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-02 Qingyin Ma , John Stachurski , Alexis Akira Toda

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have substantially enhanced the planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the theoretical basis for their effectiveness remains elusive. In this work, we investigate RL's benefits…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Siwei Wang , Yifei Shen , Haoran Sun , Shi Feng , Shang-Hua Teng , Li Dong , Yaru Hao , Wei Chen

The majority of language model training builds on imitation learning. It covers pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and affects the starting conditions for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The simplicity and scalability…

Large Language Models have demonstrated outstanding performance across various downstream tasks and have been widely applied in multiple scenarios. Human-annotated preference data is used for training to further improve LLMs' performance,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Shimao Zhang , Xiao Liu , Xin Zhang , Junxiao Liu , Zheheng Luo , Shujian Huang , Yeyun Gong

We introduce a novel approach to large language model (LLM) distillation by formulating it as a constrained reinforcement learning problem. While recent work has begun exploring the integration of task-specific rewards into distillation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Matthieu Zimmer , Xiaotong Ji , Tu Nguyen , Haitham Bou Ammar

Large Language Models are expressive tools that enable complex tasks of text understanding within Computational Social Science. Their versatility, while beneficial, poses a barrier for establishing standardized best practices within the…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Anders Giovanni Møller , Luca Maria Aiello

The large language models have achieved superior performance on various natural language tasks. One major drawback of such approaches is they are resource-intensive in fine-tuning new datasets. Soft-prompt tuning presents a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Guoxin Chen , Yiming Qian , Bowen Wang , Liangzhi Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in complex reasoning tasks through both post-training and test-time scaling laws. While prevalent test-time scaling approaches are often realized by using external reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Fuxiang Zhang , Jiacheng Xu , Chaojie Wang , Ce Cui , Yang Liu , Bo An

Language models are increasingly used in settings where outputs must satisfy user-specified randomness constraints, yet their generation probabilities are often poorly calibrated to those targets. We study whether this capability can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Davide Baldelli , Sruthi Kuriakose , Maryam Hashemzadeh , Amal Zouaq , Sarath Chandar

While the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, it remains unclear how such ability varies across languages in multilingual LLMs and whether different languages produce reasoning paths that complement each…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Sara Rajaee , Rochelle Choenni , Ekaterina Shutova , Christof Monz

Q-learning is a widely used reinforcement learning technique for solving path planning problems. It primarily involves the interaction between an agent and its environment, enabling the agent to learn an optimal strategy that maximizes…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Yiming Ji , Kaijie Yun , Yang Liu , Zongwu Xie , Hong Liu

We present a novel definition of the reinforcement learning state, actions and reward function that allows a deep Q-network (DQN) to learn to control an optimization hyperparameter. Using Q-learning with experience replay, we train two DQNs…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-06-21 Samantha Hansen

Model-free reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to a range of challenging problems, and has recently been extended to handle large neural network policies and value functions. However, the sample complexity of model-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-03 Shixiang Gu , Timothy Lillicrap , Ilya Sutskever , Sergey Levine

Q-learning is a popular Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm which is widely used in practice with function approximation (Mnih et al., 2015). In contrast, existing theoretical results are pessimistic about Q-learning. For example, (Baird,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Naman Agarwal , Syomantak Chaudhuri , Prateek Jain , Dheeraj Nagaraj , Praneeth Netrapalli

Prior work has proposed a simple strategy for reinforcement learning (RL): label experience with the outcomes achieved in that experience, and then imitate the relabeled experience. These outcome-conditioned imitation learning methods are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Benjamin Eysenbach , Soumith Udatha , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on a large amount of corpus, have demonstrated remarkable abilities. However, it may not be sufficient to directly apply open-source LLMs like Llama to certain real-world scenarios, since most of them…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Yi-Chen Li , Fuxiang Zhang , Wenjie Qiu , Lei Yuan , Chengxing Jia , Zongzhang Zhang , Yang Yu , Bo An

Sample complexity bounds are a common performance metric in the Reinforcement Learning literature. In the discounted cost, infinite horizon setting, all of the known bounds have a factor that is a polynomial in $1/(1-\gamma)$, where $\gamma…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-09 Adithya M. Devraj , Sean P. Meyn

Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have been extensively utilized in Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve the down-streaming tasks without the cost of fine-tuing the whole LLMs. Recent studies have shown how to effectively…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Zhiyuan Peng , Xuyang Wu , Qifan Wang , Sravanthi Rajanala , Yi Fang

Self-play post-training methods has emerged as an effective approach for finetuning large language models and turn the weak language model into strong language model without preference data. However, the theoretical foundations for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Shangzhe Li , Xuchao Zhang , Chetan Bansal , Weitong Zhang

The fine-tuning of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) using reinforcement learning (RL) is generally formulated as direct policy optimization. This approach was naturally favored as it efficiently improves a pretrained LLM, seen as an…