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Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for text generation. In particular, recent LLMs such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 can engage in fluent conversations with users after…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Jonathan D. Chang , Kiante Brantley , Rajkumar Ramamurthy , Dipendra Misra , Wen Sun

Due to the nature of risk management in learning applicable policies, risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RSRL) has been realized as an important direction. RSRL is usually achieved by learning risk-sensitive objectives characterized by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Ruiwen Zhou , Minghuan Liu , Kan Ren , Xufang Luo , Weinan Zhang , Dongsheng Li

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in sequential decision-making by leveraging the highly expressive model capabilities in policy learning. A central problem for learning diffusion policies is to align the policy output with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Zhao Shan , Chenyou Fan , Shuang Qiu , Jiyuan Shi , Chenjia Bai

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for deriving control policies for complex systems. As we show in two control problems, the derived policies from using the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Deep Q-Network (DQN)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-05 Jan de Priester , Ricardo G. Sanfelice , Nathan van de Wouw

Off-policy, value-based reinforcement learning methods such as Q-learning are appealing because they can learn from arbitrary experience, including data collected by older policies or other agents. In practice, however, bootstrapping makes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Armaan A. Abraham , Lucy Xiaoyang Shi , Chelsea Finn

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for a class of continuous-time linear-quadratic (LQ) control problems for diffusions, where states are scalar-valued and running control rewards are absent but volatilities of the state processes depend…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Yilie Huang , Yanwei Jia , Xun Yu Zhou

In sequential decision-making problems, Return-Conditioned Supervised Learning (RCSL) has gained increasing recognition for its simplicity and stability in modern decision-making tasks. Unlike traditional offline reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Zhishuai Liu , Yu Yang , Ruhan Wang , Pan Xu , Dongruo Zhou

Aligning large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific data remains a fundamental challenge. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) offers a straightforward way to inject domain knowledge but often degrades the model's generality. In contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Linxuan Xia , Xiaolong Yang , Yongyuan Chen , Enyue Zhao , Deng Cai , Yasheng Wang , Boxi Wu

In this paper, we present a framework to understand the convergence of commonly used Q-learning reinforcement learning algorithms in practice. Two salient features of such algorithms are: (i)~the Q-table is recursively updated using an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Amit Sinha , Matthieu Geist , Aditya Mahajan

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has evolved to be one of the main methods for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). However, existing RLHF methods are non-robust, and their performance deteriorates if the downstream…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Debmalya Mandal , Paulius Sasnauskas , Goran Radanovic

Reinforcement learning (RL) has drawn increasing interests in recent years due to its tremendous success in various applications. However, standard RL algorithms can only be applied for single reward function, and cannot adapt to an unseen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Ziyang Tang , Yihao Feng , Qiang Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely applied to sequential decision making, where interpretability and performance are both critical for practical adoption. Current approaches typically focus on performance and rely on post hoc…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Qianxin Yi , Shao-Bo Lin , Jun Fan , Yao Wang

To design rewards that align with human goals, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a prominent technique for learning reward functions from human preferences and optimizing policies via reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Taehyun Cho , Seokhun Ju , Seungyub Han , Dohyeong Kim , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), especially in scenarios where supervised fine-tuning (SFT) falls short due to limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Jian Xiong , Jingbo Zhou , Jingyong Ye , Qiang Huang , Dejing Dou

In this paper, two Q-learning (QL) methods are proposed and their convergence theories are established for addressing the model-free optimal control problem of general nonlinear continuous-time systems. By introducing the Q-function for…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2014-10-14 Biao Luo , Derong Liu , Tingwen Huang

Reinforcement learning (RL) for exponential-utility optimization in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) lacks principled value-based algorithms. We address this gap in the fixed risk-aversion setting. Building on the Bellman-type…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Gugan Thoppe , L. A. Prashanth , Ankur Naskar , Sanjay Bhat

The $Q$-learning algorithm is a simple and widely-used stochastic approximation scheme for reinforcement learning, but the basic protocol can exhibit instability in conjunction with function approximation. Such instability can be observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright

Despite rapid progress in theoretical reinforcement learning (RL) over the last few years, most of the known guarantees are worst-case in nature, failing to take advantage of structure that may be known a priori about a given RL problem at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra

Modern reinforcement learning (RL) often faces an enormous state-action space. Existing analytical results are typically for settings with a small number of state-actions, or simple models such as linearly modeled Q-functions. To derive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Sing-Yuan Yeh , Fu-Chieh Chang , Chang-Wei Yueh , Pei-Yuan Wu , Alberto Bernacchia , Sattar Vakili

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for improving the reasoning capabilities of language models (LMs) in domains such as mathematics and coding. However, most modern RL algorithms were designed to target robotics…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Lianghuan Huang , Shuo Li , Sagnik Anupam , Insup Lee , Osbert Bastani