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Related papers: Pluralistic Off-policy Evaluation and Alignment

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Existing studies on preference optimization (PO) have centered on constructing pairwise preference data following simple heuristics, such as maximizing the margin between preferred and dispreferred completions based on human (or AI) ranked…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Zhuotong Chen , Fang Liu , Xuan Zhu , Yanjun Qi , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Short- and long-term outcomes of an algorithm often differ, with damaging downstream effects. A known example is a click-bait algorithm, which may increase short-term clicks but damage long-term user engagement. A possible solution to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-25 Yuta Saito , Himan Abdollahpouri , Jesse Anderton , Ben Carterette , Mounia Lalmas

Reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to learn treatment policies and aid decision making in healthcare. However, given the need for generalization over complex state/action spaces, the incorporation of function approximators (e.g., deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-26 Shengpu Tang , Jenna Wiens

Preference learning (PL) with large language models (LLMs) aims to align the LLMs' generations with human preferences. Previous work on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has demonstrated promising results in in-distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Chen Jia

This study focuses on the topic of offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), a variant of conventional reinforcement learning that dispenses with the need for online interaction or specification of reward functions. Instead,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Yachen Kang , Diyuan Shi , Jinxin Liu , Li He , Donglin Wang

We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) from multiple logging policies, each generating a dataset of fixed size, i.e., stratified sampling. Previous work noted that in this setting the ordering of the variances of different importance sampling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Nathan Kallus , Yuta Saito , Masatoshi Uehara

Evaluating a policy by deploying it in the real world can be risky and costly. Off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) algorithms use historical data collected from running a previous policy to evaluate a new policy, which provides a means for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-07 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Philip S. Thomas , Emma Brunskill

The Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) problem consists of evaluating the performance of counterfactual policies with data collected by another one. To solve the OPE problem, we resort to estimators, which aim to estimate in the most accurate way…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Nicolò Felicioni , Michael Benigni , Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a promising solution to align large language models (LLMs) more closely with human values. Off-policy preference optimization, where the preference data is obtained from other models, is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Wenxuan Zhou , Ravi Agrawal , Shujian Zhang , Sathish Reddy Indurthi , Sanqiang Zhao , Kaiqiang Song , Silei Xu , Chenguang Zhu

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Daniel Shin , Daniel S. Brown , Anca D. Dragan

In applying reinforcement learning (RL) to high-stakes domains, quantitative and qualitative evaluation using observational data can help practitioners understand the generalization performance of new policies. However, this type of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Shengpu Tang , Jenna Wiens

This work studies the challenge of aligning large language models (LLMs) with offline preference data. We focus on alignment by Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in particular. While popular preference optimization methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Xiang Ji , Sanjeev Kulkarni , Mengdi Wang , Tengyang Xie

Recommendation systems leverage user interaction data to suggest relevant items while filtering out irrelevant (negative) ones. The rise of large language models (LLMs) has garnered increasing attention for their potential in recommendation…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Chenlu Ding , Daoxuan Liu , Jiancan Wu , Xingyu Hu , Junkang Wu , Haitao Wang , Yongkang Wang , Xingxing Wang , Xiang Wang

Human preference alignment is critical in building powerful and reliable large language models (LLMs). However, current methods either ignore the multi-dimensionality of human preferences (e.g. helpfulness and harmlessness) or struggle with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Xingzhou Lou , Junge Zhang , Jian Xie , Lifeng Liu , Dong Yan , Kaiqi Huang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown promise in aligning large language models (LLMs). Yet its reliance on a singular reward model often overlooks the diversity of human preferences. Recent approaches address this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Tianze Wang , Dongnan Gui , Yifan Hu , Shuhang Lin , Linjun Zhang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize a policy using collected data without online interactions. Model-based approaches are particularly appealing for addressing offline RL challenges because of their capability to mitigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Hao Li , Xiao-Hu Zhou , Shu-Hai Li , Mei-Jiang Gui , Xiao-Liang Xie , Shi-Qi Liu , Shuang-Yi Wang , Zhen-Qiu Feng , Zeng-Guang Hou

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the value of a target policy from samples obtained via different policies. Recently, applying OPE methods for bandit problems has garnered attention. For the theoretical guarantees of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Masahiro Kato , Kenshi Abe , Kaito Ariu , Shota Yasui

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods aim to estimate the value of a new reinforcement learning (RL) policy prior to deployment. Recent advances have shown that leveraging auxiliary datasets, such as those synthesized by generative models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Aishwarya Mandyam , Jason Meng , Ge Gao , Jiankai Sun , Mac Schwager , Barbara E. Engelhardt , Emma Brunskill

In real-world recommender systems and search engines, optimizing ranking decisions to present a ranked list of relevant items is critical. Off-policy evaluation (OPE) for ranking policies is thus gaining a growing interest because it…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-04 Haruka Kiyohara , Yuta Saito , Tatsuya Matsuhiro , Yusuke Narita , Nobuyuki Shimizu , Yasuo Yamamoto

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) constructs confidence intervals for the value of a target policy using data generated under a different behavior policy. Most existing inference methods focus on fixed target policies and may fail when the target…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-21 Haoyu Wei