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Offline reinforcement learning requires reconciling two conflicting aims: learning a policy that improves over the behavior policy that collected the dataset, while at the same time minimizing the deviation from the behavior policy so as to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-13 Ilya Kostrikov , Ashvin Nair , Sergey Levine

Q-learning is a popular Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm which is widely used in practice with function approximation (Mnih et al., 2015). In contrast, existing theoretical results are pessimistic about Q-learning. For example, (Baird,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Naman Agarwal , Syomantak Chaudhuri , Prateek Jain , Dheeraj Nagaraj , Praneeth Netrapalli

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Xiaohan Hu , Yi Ma , Chenjun Xiao , Yan Zheng , Jianye Hao

The growing disparity between the exponential scaling of computational resources and the finite growth of high-quality text data now constrains conventional scaling approaches for large language models (LLMs). To address this challenge, we…

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) enhances the understanding of the effects of the randomness in the environment by letting agents learn the distribution of a random return, rather than its expected value as in standard RL. At the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-27 Zifan Wang , Yulong Gao , Siyi Wang , Michael M. Zavlanos , Alessandro Abate , Karl H. Johansson

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

It is commonly believed that optimizing the reverse KL divergence results in "mode seeking", while optimizing forward KL results in "mass covering", with the latter being preferred if the goal is to sample from multiple diverse modes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Anthony GX-Chen , Jatin Prakash , Jeff Guo , Rob Fergus , Rajesh Ranganath

This paper introduces Meta-Q-Learning (MQL), a new off-policy algorithm for meta-Reinforcement Learning (meta-RL). MQL builds upon three simple ideas. First, we show that Q-learning is competitive with state-of-the-art meta-RL algorithms if…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Rasool Fakoor , Pratik Chaudhari , Stefano Soatto , Alexander J. Smola

We investigate reinforcement learning (RL) in the presence of distributional mismatch between training and deployment, where policies trained in simulators often underperform in practice due to mismatches between training and deployment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Debamita Ghosh , George K. Atia , Yue Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Penghui Qi , Xiangxin Zhou , Zichen Liu , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Min Lin , Wee Sun Lee

Scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to recommender systems (RS) is promising since maximizing the expected cumulative rewards for RL agents meets the objective of RS, i.e., improving customers' long-term satisfaction. A key approach to this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Chengqian Gao , Ke Xu , Kuangqi Zhou , Lanqing Li , Xueqian Wang , Bo Yuan , Peilin Zhao

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective method of finding reasoning pathways in incomplete knowledge graphs (KGs). To overcome the challenges of a large action space, a self-supervised pre-training method is proposed to warm up the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Ying Ma , Owen Burns , Mingqiu Wang , Gang Li , Nan Du , Laurent El Shafey , Liqiang Wang , Izhak Shafran , Hagen Soltau

While scaling laws for large language models (LLMs) during pre-training have been extensively studied, their behavior under reinforcement learning (RL) post-training remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a systematic empirical…

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

Value-based reinforcement learning (RL) can in principle learn effective policies for a wide range of multi-turn problems, from games to dialogue to robotic control, including via offline RL from static previously collected datasets.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Joey Hong , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine

The $Q$-function is a central quantity in many Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for which RL agents behave following a (soft)-greedy policy w.r.t. to $Q$. It is a powerful tool that allows action selection without a model of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Nino Vieillard , Marcin Andrychowicz , Anton Raichuk , Olivier Pietquin , Matthieu Geist

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are promising alternatives to autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), as they potentially allow higher inference throughput. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a crucial component for dLLMs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yuchen Zhu , Wei Guo , Jaemoo Choi , Petr Molodyk , Bo Yuan , Molei Tao , Yongxin Chen

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

Diffusion models have garnered widespread attention in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for their powerful expressiveness and multimodality. It has been verified that utilizing diffusion policies can significantly improve the performance of RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Shutong Ding , Ke Hu , Zhenhao Zhang , Kan Ren , Weinan Zhang , Jingyi Yu , Jingya Wang , Ye Shi

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in LLM reasoning, but whether it can also improve direct recall of parametric knowledge remains an open question. We study this question in a controlled zero-shot, one-hop,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Wanli Yang , Hongyu Zang , Junwei Zhang , Wenjie Shi , Du Su , Jingang Wang , Xueqi Cheng , Fei Sun