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Offline reinforcement learning (RL) allows for the training of competent agents from offline datasets without any interaction with the environment. Online finetuning of such offline models can further improve performance. But how should we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-31 Yicheng Luo , Jackie Kay , Edward Grefenstette , Marc Peter Deisenroth

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is notoriously data-inefficient, which makes training on a real robot difficult. While model-based RL algorithms (world models) improve data-efficiency to some extent, they still require hours or days of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Yunhai Feng , Nicklas Hansen , Ziyan Xiong , Chandramouli Rajagopalan , Xiaolong Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Lianghuan Huang , Sagnik Anupam , Insup Lee , Shuo Li , Osbert Bastani

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with problems that require multi-step reasoning. For small-scale open-source models, Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) fails when correct solutions are rarely sampled even…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yihe Deng , I-Hung Hsu , Jun Yan , Zifeng Wang , Rujun Han , Gufeng Zhang , Yanfei Chen , Wei Wang , Tomas Pfister , Chen-Yu Lee

Large reasoning models (LRMs) are commonly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to explore long chain-of-thought reasoning, achieving strong performance at high computational cost. Recent methods add multi-reward objectives to jointly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anhao Zhao , Ziyang Chen , Junlong Tong , Yingqi Fan , Fanghua Ye , Shuhao Li , Yunpu Ma , Wenjie Li , Xiaoyu Shen

Large Language Model (LLM) agents show great promise for complex, multi-turn tool-use tasks, but their development is often hampered by the extreme scarcity of high-quality training data. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on synthetic data leads…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Siyuan Lu , Zechuan Wang , Hongxuan Zhang , Qintong Wu , Leilei Gan , Chenyi Zhuang , Jinjie Gu , Tao Lin

Effectively leveraging large, previously collected datasets in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key challenge for large-scale real-world applications. Offline RL algorithms promise to learn effective policies from previously-collected,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Aviral Kumar , Aurick Zhou , George Tucker , Sergey Levine

A compelling use case of offline reinforcement learning (RL) is to obtain a policy initialization from existing datasets followed by fast online fine-tuning with limited interaction. However, existing offline RL methods tend to behave…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Mitsuhiko Nakamoto , Yuexiang Zhai , Anikait Singh , Max Sobol Mark , Yi Ma , Chelsea Finn , Aviral Kumar , Sergey Levine

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a standard post-training recipe for improving Large Language Models (LLM) reasoning, but why it works remains unclear. We revisit the common claim that ``SFT memorizes,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Hangzhan Jin , Sitao Luan , Tianwei Ni , Sicheng Lyu , Guillaume Rabusseau , Reihaneh Rabbany , Doina Precup , Mohammad Hamdaqa

Automatic code generation has been a longstanding research topic. With the advancement of general-purpose large language models (LLMs), the ability to code stands out as one important measure to the model's reasoning performance. Usually, a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Jie Chen , Xintian Han , Yu Ma , Xun Zhou , Liang Xiang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou

In complex environments with large discrete action spaces, effective decision-making is critical in reinforcement learning (RL). Despite the widespread use of value-based RL approaches like Q-learning, they come with a computational burden,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Fares Fourati , Vaneet Aggarwal , Mohamed-Slim Alouini

Self-correction is a highly desirable capability of large language models (LLMs), yet it has consistently been found to be largely ineffective in modern LLMs. Current methods for training self-correction typically depend on either multiple…

From a first-principles perspective, it may seem odd that the strongest results in foundation model fine-tuning (FT) are achieved via a relatively complex, two-stage training procedure. Specifically, one first trains a reward model (RM) on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Gokul Swamy , Sanjiban Choudhury , Wen Sun , Zhiwei Steven Wu , J. Andrew Bagnell

Behavior Cloning (BC) on curated (or filtered) data is the predominant paradigm for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models; as well as for imitation learning of control policies. Here, we draw on a connection between this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Chongli Qin , Jost Tobias Springenberg

While state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex visual-text tasks, their success heavily relies on massive model scaling, limiting their practical deployment. Small-scale VLMs offer…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Huilin Deng , Ding Zou , Rui Ma , Hongchen Luo , Yang Cao , Yu Kang

One way to enhance the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is to conduct Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotations. This approach does not show sufficiently strong generalization ability,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Trung Quoc Luong , Xinbo Zhang , Zhanming Jie , Peng Sun , Xiaoran Jin , Hang Li

Offline reinforcement learning can enable policy learning from pre-collected, sub-optimal datasets without online interactions. This makes it ideal for real-world robots and safety-critical scenarios, where collecting online data or expert…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Sreyas Venkataraman , Yufei Wang , Ziyu Wang , Navin Sriram Ravie , Zackory Erickson , David Held

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…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) looks at learning how to optimally solve tasks using a fixed dataset of interactions from the environment. Many off-policy algorithms developed for online learning struggle in the offline setting as they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Natinael Solomon Neggatu , Jeremie Houssineau , Giovanni Montana