Related papers: Q-Probe: A Lightweight Approach to Reward Maximiza…

Question-answering (QA) is an important application of Information Retrieval (IR) and language models, and the latest trend is toward pre-trained large neural networks with embedding parameters. Augmenting QA performances with these LLMs…

Conventional reward modeling relies on gradient descent over neural weights, creating opaque, data-hungry "black boxes." We propose a paradigm shift from implicit to explicit reward parameterization, recasting optimization from continuous…

Large language models (LLMs) can be used as accessible and intelligent chatbots by constructing natural language queries and directly inputting the prompt into the large language model. However, different prompt' constructions often lead to…

Reinforcement learning (RL) enhanced large language models (LLMs), particularly exemplified by DeepSeek-R1, have exhibited outstanding performance. Despite the effectiveness in improving LLM capabilities, its implementation remains highly…

Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is essential for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on memory-constrained devices, yet it renders models static and difficult to fine-tune. Standard fine-tuning paradigms, including Reinforcement…

Preference alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly improved their ability to adhere to human instructions and intentions. However, existing direct alignment algorithms primarily focus on relative preferences and often…

Entropy augmented to reward is known to soften the greedy argmax policy to softmax policy. Entropy augmentation is reformulated and leads to a motivation to introduce an additional entropy term to the objective function in the form of…

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework which is suitable for both the batch RL setting and the setting where there are many reward functions of interest. During the exploration phase, an agent collects samples without using…

To help evaluate and understand the latent capabilities of language models, this paper introduces an approach using optimized input embeddings, or 'soft prompts,' as a metric of conditional distance between a model and a target behavior.…

Many capable large language models (LLMs) are developed via self-supervised pre-training followed by a reinforcement-learning fine-tuning phase, often based on human or AI feedback. During this stage, models may be guided by their inductive…

In Reinforcement Learning the Q-learning algorithm provably converges to the optimal solution. However, as others have demonstrated, Q-learning can also overestimate the values and thereby spend too long exploring unhelpful states. Double…

$Q$-learning is the most fundamental model-free reinforcement learning algorithm. Deployment of $Q$-learning requires approximation of the state-action value function (also known as the $Q$-function). In this work, we provide online random…

Text embeddings are essential for many tasks, such as document retrieval, clustering, and semantic similarity assessment. In this paper, we study how to contrastively train text embedding models in a compute-optimal fashion, given a suite…

We methodologically address the problem of Q-value overestimation in deep reinforcement learning to handle high-dimensional state spaces efficiently. By adapting concepts from information theory, we introduce an intrinsic penalty signal…

Modern reinforcement learning (RL) often faces an enormous state-action space. Existing analytical results are typically for settings with a small number of state-actions, or simple models such as linearly modeled Q-functions. To derive…

This work studies knowledge distillation (KD) for large language models (LLMs) through preference optimization. We propose a reward-guided imitation learning framework for sequential KD, formulating a min-max optimization problem between…

Reinforcement learning has traditionally been studied with exponential discounting or the average reward setup, mainly due to their mathematical tractability. However, such frameworks fall short of accurately capturing human behavior, which…

Reinforcement learning algorithms based on Q-learning are driving Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) research towards solving complex problems and achieving super-human performance on many of them. Nevertheless, Q-Learning is known to be…

We study the problem of learning to generate an answer (or completion) to a question (or prompt), where there could be multiple correct answers, any one of which is acceptable at test time. Learning is based on demonstrations of some…

Recent advances in reasoning with large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on complex mathematical tasks, including combinatorial optimization. Techniques such as Chain-of-Thought and In-Context Learning have…