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We study time-inhomogeneous episodic reinforcement learning (RL) under general function approximation and sparse rewards. We design a new algorithm, Variance-weighted Optimistic $Q$-Learning (VO$Q$L), based on $Q$-learning and bound its…

This paper presents a model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to synthesize a control policy that maximizes the satisfaction probability of linear temporal logic (LTL) specifications. Due to the consideration of environment and…

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims at learning an optimal control from a fixed dataset, without interactions with the system. An agent in this setting should avoid selecting actions whose consequences cannot be predicted from the…

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

Recent advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved great success in fine-tuning diffusion-based generative models. However, fine-tuning continuous flow-based generative models to align with arbitrary user-defined reward…

A default assumption in reinforcement learning (RL) and optimal control is that observations arrive at discrete time points on a fixed clock cycle. Yet, many applications involve continuous-time systems where the time discretization, in…

In reinforcement learning (RL), temporal difference (TD) errors are widely adopted for optimizing value and policy functions. However, since the TD error is defined by a bootstrap method, its computation tends to be noisy and destabilize…

Language model (LM) alignment improves model outputs to reflect human preferences while preserving the capabilities of the base model. The most common alignment approaches are (i) reinforcement learning, which maximizes the expected reward…

Crafting effective reward signals remains a central challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially for complex reasoning tasks. Existing automated reward optimization methods typically rely on derivative-free search heuristics that…

We consider the problem of reward learning for temporally extended tasks. For reward learning, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is a widely used paradigm. Given a Markov decision process (MDP) and a set of demonstrations for a task, IRL…

Meta-reinforcement learning (RL) methods can meta-train policies that adapt to new tasks with orders of magnitude less data than standard RL, but meta-training itself is costly and time-consuming. If we can meta-train on offline data, then…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) or Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) are two key steps in the post-training of modern Language Models (LMs). A common problem is reward hacking, where the policy may exploit inaccuracies of the…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a dominant paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models, yet its effectiveness varies across tasks and compute budgets. We propose a \emph{relative-budget} theory explaining this…

We study the model-based reward-free reinforcement learning with linear function approximation for episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this setting, the agent works in two phases. In the exploration phase, the agent interacts with…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is attracting attention as an effective way to solve sequential optimization problems that involve high dimensional state/action space and stochastic uncertainties. Many such problems involve constraints…

Reinforcement Learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been shown a promising direction for aligning generative models with human intent and has also been explored in recent works for alignment of diffusion generative models. In this work,…

In experimenting with off-policy temporal difference (TD) methods in hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) systems, we have observed unwanted on-policy learning under reproducible conditions. Here we present modifications to several TD…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach. However, success is limited to real-world applications, because ensuring safe exploration and facilitating adequate exploitation is a challenge for controlling robotic systems with…

Temporal-difference learning (TD), coupled with neural networks, is among the most fundamental building blocks of deep reinforcement learning. However, due to the nonlinearity in value function approximation, such a coupling leads to…

In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…