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Large language models are increasingly used for complex reasoning tasks where high-quality offline data such as expert-annotated solutions and distilled reasoning traces are often available. However, in environments with sparse rewards,…

Video generation models produce visually coherent content but struggle with tasks requiring spatial reasoning and multi-step planning. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a path to improve generalization, but its effectiveness in video…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has experienced a second wind in the past decade. While incredibly successful in images and videos, these systems still operate within the realm of propositional tasks ignoring the inherent structure that exists…

Recent advancements in reasoning-focused language models such as OpenAI's O1 and DeepSeek-R1 have shown that scaling test-time computation-through chain-of-thought reasoning and iterative exploration-can yield substantial improvements on…

A significant challenge for the practical application of reinforcement learning in the real world is the need to specify an oracle reward function that correctly defines a task. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to avoid this…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been a main driver of recent breakthroughs in large reasoning models. Yet it remains a mystery how rewards based solely on final outcomes can help overcome the long-horizon barrier…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the most practical ways to learn from real-life use-cases. Motivated from the cognitive methods used by humans makes it a widely acceptable strategy in the field of artificial intelligence. Most of the…

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning, grounded on combining classical theoretical results with Deep Learning paradigm, led to breakthroughs in many artificial intelligence tasks and gave birth to Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) as a…

Improving the multi-step reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a critical yet challenging task. The dominant paradigm, outcome-supervised reinforcement learning (RLVR), rewards only correct final answers, often propagating…

Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is an approach wherein the experience gained from solving a variety of tasks is distilled into a meta-policy. The meta-policy, when adapted over only a small (or just a single) number of steps, is able…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework to optimize a control policy using rewards that are revealed by the system as a response to a control action. In its standard form, RL involves a single agent that uses its policy to accomplish a…

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to explicitly infer an underlying reward function based on collected expert demonstrations. Considering that obtaining expert demonstrations can be costly, the focus of current IRL techniques is on…

The potential of reinforcement learning (RL) to deliver aligned and performant agents is partially bottlenecked by the reward engineering problem. One alternative to heuristic trial-and-error is preference-based RL (PbRL), where a reward…

When Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are deployed in practice, they might impact their environment and change its dynamics. We propose a new framework to model this phenomenon, where the current environment depends on the deployed policy…

In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), alignment has emerged as a fundamental yet challenging problem in the pursuit of more reliable, controllable, and capable machine intelligence. The recent success of reasoning models and…

A significant obstacle in the development of robust machine learning models is covariate shift, a form of distribution shift that occurs when the input distributions of the training and test sets differ while the conditional label…

Empowered by deep neural networks, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has demonstrated tremendous empirical successes in various domains, including games, health care, and autonomous driving. Despite these advancements, DRL is still…

This thesis rigorously studies fundamental reinforcement learning (RL) methods in modern practical considerations, including robust RL, distributional RL, and offline RL with neural function approximation. The thesis first prepares the…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated promising gains in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, its dependence on domain-specific verifiers significantly restricts its…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has proven effective in improving Large Language Model's (LLM) reasoning ability. However, the learning dynamics of RLVR remain underexplored. In this paper, we reveal a counterintuitive…