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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…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), with recent innovations such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) demonstrating exceptional…

This dissertation investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) methods can be designed to be safe, sample-efficient, and robust. Framed through the unifying perspective of contextual-bandit RL, the work addresses two major application…

Optimizing the fuel cycle cost through the optimization of nuclear reactor core loading patterns involves multiple objectives and constraints, leading to a vast number of candidate solutions that cannot be explicitly solved. To advance the…

Iterative preference optimization methods have recently been shown to perform well for general instruction tuning tasks, but typically make little improvement on reasoning tasks (Yuan et al., 2024, Chen et al., 2024). In this work we…

The reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) can be unleashed with reinforcement learning (RL) (OpenAI, 2024; DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025a; Zeng et al., 2025). The success of existing RL attempts in LLMs usually rely on high-quality…

Data selection for finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) can be framed as a budget-constrained optimization problem: maximizing a model's downstream performance under a strict training data budget. Solving this problem is generally…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (\textbf{RLHF}) has emerged as a dominant approach for aligning LLM outputs with human preferences. Inspired by the success of RLHF, we study the performance of multiple algorithms that learn from…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated profound impact on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, their effective deployment across diverse domains often require domain-specific adaptation strategies, as generic models may…

Experience replay is a foundational technique in reinforcement learning that enhances learning stability by storing past experiences in a replay buffer and reusing them during training. Despite its practical success, its theoretical…

Network pruning is an effective method to reduce the computational expense of over-parameterized neural networks for deployment on low-resource systems. Recent state-of-the-art techniques for retraining pruned networks such as weight…

Preference optimization methods have been successfully applied to improve not only the alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values, but also specific natural language tasks such as summarization and stylistic continuations.…

Search algorithms and user query relevance have given LLMs the ability to return relevant information, but the effect of content phrasing on ad visibility remains underexplored. We investigate how LLM-based rewriting of advertisements can…

This paper proposes a novel formulation for reinforcement learning (RL) with large language models, explaining why and under what conditions the true sequence-level reward can be optimized via a surrogate token-level objective in policy…

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks via full fine-tuning is increasingly impractical due to its computational and memory demands. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approaches such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA)…

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) lowers the computational and memory overhead of fine-tuning large models by updating a low-dimensional subspace of the pre-trained weight matrix. Albeit efficient, LoRA exhibits suboptimal convergence and…

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have been driven by their emergent reasoning capabilities, particularly through long chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, which enables thorough exploration and deliberation. Despite these…

The integration of reinforcement learning (RL) into large language models (LLMs) has opened new opportunities for recommender systems by eliciting reasoning and improving user preference modeling. However, RL-based LLM recommendation faces…

Executing workflows on volunteer computing resources where individual tasks may be forced to relinquish their resource for the resource's primary use leads to unpredictability and often significantly increases execution time. Task…

Replaying data is a principal mechanism underlying the stability and data efficiency of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). We present an effective yet simple framework to extend the use of replays across multiple experiments, minimally…