English
Related papers

Related papers: Hyperparameter Optimization Can Even be Harmful in…

200 papers

Aligning intelligent agents with human preferences and values is important. This paper examines two popular alignment methods: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Reward-Model-Based Policy Optimization (RMB-PO). A variant of RMB-PO,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Ziniu Li , Tian Xu , Yang Yu

Improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning algorithms requires effective exploration. Following the principle of $\textit{optimism in the face of uncertainty}$ (OFU), we train a separate exploration policy to maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Jiachen Li , Shuo Cheng , Zhenyu Liao , Huayan Wang , William Yang Wang , Qinxun Bai

A fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning is to learn policies that generalize beyond the operating domains experienced during training. In this paper, we approach this challenge through the following invariance principle: an agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Anoopkumar Sonar , Vincent Pacelli , Anirudha Majumdar

In many settings, a decision-maker wishes to learn a rule, or policy, that maps from observable characteristics of an individual to an action. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements, or emails to send to consumers, as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-20 Zhengyuan Zhou , Susan Athey , Stefan Wager

The ability to exploit prior experience to solve novel problems rapidly is a hallmark of biological learning systems and of great practical importance for artificial ones. In the meta reinforcement learning literature much recent work has…

Policy optimization methods with function approximation are widely used in multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, it remains elusive how to design such algorithms with statistical guarantees. Leveraging a multi-agent performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Yulai Zhao , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Jason D. Lee

The ability to perform effective off-policy learning would revolutionize the process of building better interactive systems, such as search engines and recommendation systems for e-commerce, computational advertising and news. Recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-27 Damien Lefortier , Adith Swaminathan , Xiaotao Gu , Thorsten Joachims , Maarten de Rijke

Hyperparameter optimization (HPO) is an important step in machine learning (ML) model development, but common practices are archaic -- primarily relying on manual or grid searches. This is partly because adopting advanced HPO algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Sungduk Yu , Mike Pritchard , Po-Lun Ma , Balwinder Singh , Sam Silva

When learning policies for real-world domains, two important questions arise: (i) how to efficiently use pre-collected off-policy, non-optimal behavior data; and (ii) how to mediate among different competing objectives and constraints. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-22 Hoang M. Le , Cameron Voloshin , Yisong Yue

This work studies the problem of large language model (LLM) unlearning, aiming to remove unwanted data influences (e.g., copyrighted or harmful content) while preserving model utility. Despite the increasing demand for unlearning, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Chongyu Fan , Jiancheng Liu , Licong Lin , Jinghan Jia , Ruiqi Zhang , Song Mei , Sijia Liu

By reusing data throughout training, off-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithms offer improved sample efficiency relative to on-policy approaches. For continuous action spaces, the most popular methods for off-policy learning include…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Jared Markowitz , Jesse Silverberg , Gary Collins

To reach high performance with deep learning, hyperparameter optimization (HPO) is essential. This process is usually time-consuming due to costly evaluations of neural networks. Early discarding techniques limit the resources granted to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-08 Romain Egele , Felix Mohr , Tom Viering , Prasanna Balaprakash

Aligning large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific data remains a fundamental challenge. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) offers a straightforward way to inject domain knowledge but often degrades the model's generality. In contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Linxuan Xia , Xiaolong Yang , Yongyuan Chen , Enyue Zhao , Deng Cai , Yasheng Wang , Boxi Wu

Offline model-based optimization (MBO) seeks to discover high-performing designs using only a fixed dataset of past evaluations. Most existing methods rely on learning a surrogate model via regression and implicitly assume that good…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Shen-Huan Lyu , Rong-Xi Tan , Ke Xue , Yi-Xiao He , Yu Huang , Qingfu Zhang , Chao Qian

We study reinforcement learning in hybrid discrete-continuous action spaces, such as settings where the discrete component selects a regime (or index) and the continuous component optimizes within it -- a structure common in robotics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Matias Alvo , Daniel Russo , Yash Kanoria

Hyperparameter optimization (HPO) is crucial for fine-tuning machine learning models but can be computationally expensive. To reduce costs, Multi-fidelity HPO (MF-HPO) leverages intermediate accuracy levels in the learning process and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-27 Romain Egele , Isabelle Guyon , Yixuan Sun , Prasanna Balaprakash

We study the problem of online learning in adversarial bandit problems under a partial observability model called off-policy feedback. In this sequential decision making problem, the learner cannot directly observe its rewards, but instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Germano Gabbianelli , Matteo Papini , Gergely Neu

Algorithms for learning programmatic representations for sequential decision-making problems are often evaluated on out-of-distribution (OOD) problems, with the common conclusion that programmatic policies generalize better than neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Amirhossein Rajabpour , Kiarash Aghakasiri , Sandra Zilles , Levi H. S. Lelis

We propose the first boosting algorithm for off-policy learning from logged bandit feedback. Unlike existing boosting methods for supervised learning, our algorithm directly optimizes an estimate of the policy's expected reward. We analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-03 Ben London , Levi Lu , Ted Sandler , Thorsten Joachims

Lexicographic multi-objective problems, which impose a lexicographic importance order over the objectives, arise in many real-life scenarios. Existing Reinforcement Learning work directly addressing lexicographic tasks has been scarce. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Alperen Tercan , Vinayak S. Prabhu