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Follow-the-Regularized-Lead (FTRL) and Online Mirror Descent (OMD) are regret minimization algorithms for Online Convex Optimization (OCO), they are mathematically elegant but less practical in solving Extensive-Form Games (EFGs).…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) shows promise of applying RL to real-world problems by effectively utilizing previously collected data. Most existing offline RL algorithms use regularization or constraints to suppress extrapolation…
Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently use on-policy algorithms, such as PPO or GRPO. However, policy lag from distributed training architectures and differences between the training and inference…
Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) is a generalization of traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) that aims to optimize multiple, often conflicting objectives simultaneously rather than focusing on a single reward. This approach…
Recent work shows that preference alignment objectives can be interpreted as divergence estimators between aligned (preferred) & unaligned (less-preferred) distributions, yielding a principled recipe for designing alignment losses. However,…
In this paper, the solution to the empirical risk minimization problem with $f$-divergence regularization (ERM-$f$DR) is presented and conditions under which the solution also serves as the solution to the minimization of the expected…
Recent years have witnessed the rapid progress of generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, the success of the GAN models hinges on a large amount of training data. This work proposes a regularization approach for training robust GAN…
Counterfactual reasoning from logged data has become increasingly important for many applications such as web advertising or healthcare. In this paper, we address the problem of learning stochastic policies with continuous actions from the…
The key of the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is to generalize invariance from training domains to target domains. The variance risk extrapolation (V-REx) is a practical OOD method, which depends on a domain-level regularization…
Online interactions with the environment to collect data samples for training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent is not always feasible due to economic and safety concerns. The goal of Offline Reinforcement Learning is to address this…
We develop an approach to risk minimization and stochastic optimization that provides a convex surrogate for variance, allowing near-optimal and computationally efficient trading between approximation and estimation error. Our approach…
Recent domain generalization (DG) approaches typically use the hypothesis learned on source domains for inference on the unseen target domain. However, such a hypothesis can be arbitrarily far from the optimal one for the target domain,…
One of the fundamental challenges for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is ensuring robustness to data distribution. Whether the data originates from a near-optimal policy or not, we anticipate that an algorithm should demonstrate its…
Many model-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods follow a similar template: fit a model to previously observed data, and then use data from that model for RL or planning. However, models that achieve better training performance (e.g.,…
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) was introduced and used recently for promoting reasoning in LLMs under verifiable (binary) rewards. We show that the mean + variance calibration of these rewards induces a weighted contrastive loss…
Function approximation is a powerful approach for structuring large decision problems that has facilitated great achievements in the areas of reinforcement learning and game playing. Regression counterfactual regret minimization (RCFR) is a…
We study model-based reinforcement learning in an unknown finite communicating Markov decision process. We propose a simple algorithm that leverages a variance based confidence interval. We show that the proposed algorithm, UCRL-V, achieves…
The solution to empirical risk minimization with $f$-divergence regularization (ERM-$f$DR) is presented under mild conditions on $f$. Under such conditions, the optimal measure is shown to be unique. Examples of the solution for particular…
For many applications in signal processing and machine learning, we are tasked with minimizing a large sum of convex functions subject to a large number of convex constraints. In this paper, we devise a new random projection method (RPM) to…
We revisit the stochastic variance-reduced policy gradient (SVRPG) method proposed by Papini et al. (2018) for reinforcement learning. We provide an improved convergence analysis of SVRPG and show that it can find an $\epsilon$-approximate…