English
Related papers

Related papers: RL's Razor: Why Online Reinforcement Learning Forg…

200 papers

We study how reasoning evolves in a language model -- from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to reinforcement learning (RL) -- by analyzing how a set of theoretically-inspired datasets influences language model performance in chess. We find that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Lucas Dionisopoulos , Nicklas Majamaki , Prithviraj Ammanabrolu

Incorporating high-level knowledge is an effective way to expedite reinforcement learning (RL), especially for complex tasks with sparse rewards. We investigate an RL problem where the high-level knowledge is in the form of reward machines,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Zhe Xu , Ivan Gavran , Yousef Ahmad , Rupak Majumdar , Daniel Neider , Ufuk Topcu , Bo Wu

In information retrieval, training reranking models mainly focuses on two types of objectives: metric learning (e.g. contrastive loss to increase the predicted scores on relevant query-document pairs) and classification (binary label…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Ziqi Dai , Xin Zhang , Mingxin Li , Yanzhao Zhang , Dingkun Long , Pengjun Xie , Meishan Zhang , Wenjie Li , Min Zhang

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) which seeks to learn a good policy based on a fixed, pre-collected dataset. A fundamental challenge behind this task is the distributional shift due to the dataset lacking sufficient exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Wenzhuo Zhou

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) optimizes the policy on a previously collected dataset without any interactions with the environment, yet usually suffers from the distributional shift problem. To mitigate this issue, a typical solution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Qisen Yang , Shenzhi Wang , Qihang Zhang , Gao Huang , Shiji Song

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are known to scale poorly to environments with many available actions, requiring numerous samples to learn an optimal policy. The traditional approach of considering the same fixed action space in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-15 Leo Ardon , Alberto Pozanco , Daniel Borrajo , Sumitra Ganesh

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on domain-specific datasets is a common approach to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to specialized tasks but is often believed to degrade their general capabilities. In this work, we revisit this trade-off…

Recently, Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable progress with the emergence of various algorithms and datasets. However, these methods usually focus on algorithmic advancements, ignoring that many low-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Bingyi Kang , Xiao Ma , Yirui Wang , Yang Yue , Shuicheng Yan

Sample efficiency is critical when applying learning-based methods to robotic manipulation due to the high cost of collecting expert demonstrations and the challenges of on-robot policy learning through online Reinforcement Learning (RL).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Arsh Tangri , Ondrej Biza , Dian Wang , David Klee , Owen Howell , Robert Platt

Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning has become a key technique for enhancing large language models (LLMs) on reasoning-intensive tasks, motivating its extension to vision-language models (VLMs). While RL-tuned VLMs improve on visual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Rosie Zhao , Anshul Shah , Xiaoyu Zhu , Xinke Deng , Zhongyu Jiang , Yang Yang , Joerg Liebelt , Arnab Mondal

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in decision-making tasks, where not only accuracy but also reliable confidence estimates are essential. Well-calibrated confidence enables downstream systems to decide when to trust a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Duygu Nur Yaldiz , Evangelia Spiliopoulou , Zheng Qi , Siddharth Varia , Srikanth Doss , Nikolaos Pappas

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems are fundamental in online decision-making and have been instrumental in finding an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Function approximations are usually deployed to handle large or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jiashuo Jiang , Yiming Zong , Yinyu Ye

Everything else being equal, simpler models should be preferred over more complex ones. In reinforcement learning (RL), simplicity is typically quantified on an action-by-action basis -- but this timescale ignores temporal regularities,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Tankred Saanum , Noémi Éltető , Peter Dayan , Marcel Binz , Eric Schulz

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models can be viewed as an off-policy learning problem, where expert demonstrations come from a fixed behavior policy while training aims to optimize a target policy. Importance sampling is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Shiwan Zhao , Xuyang Zhao , Jiaming Zhou , Aobo Kong , Qicheng Li , Yong Qin

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) allows agents to learn effective, return-maximizing policies from a static dataset. Three popular algorithms for offline RL are Conservative Q-Learning (CQL), Behavior Cloning (BC), and Decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Prajjwal Bhargava , Rohan Chitnis , Alborz Geramifard , Shagun Sodhani , Amy Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-08 Vitchyr H. Pong , Ashvin Nair , Laura Smith , Catherine Huang , Sergey Levine

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) can in principle synthesize more optimal behavior from a dataset consisting only of suboptimal trials. One way that this can happen is by "stitching" together the best parts of otherwise suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Joey Hong , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables learning control policies by utilizing only prior experience, without any online interaction. This can allow robots to acquire generalizable skills from large and diverse datasets, without any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-24 Aviral Kumar , Anikait Singh , Stephen Tian , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) tries to learn the near-optimal policy with recorded offline experience without online exploration. Current offline RL research includes: 1) generative modeling, i.e., approximating a policy using fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Hua Wei , Deheng Ye , Zhao Liu , Hao Wu , Bo Yuan , Qiang Fu , Wei Yang , Zhenhui Li

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) plays a critical role for pretrained large language models (LLMs), notably enhancing their capacity to acquire domain-specific knowledge while preserving or potentially augmenting their general-purpose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Ali Taheri , Alireza Taban , Qizhou Wang , Shanshan Ye , Abdolreza Mirzaei , Tongliang Liu , Bo Han