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Related papers: Pluralistic Off-policy Evaluation and Alignment

200 papers

We study distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE), of which the goal is to learn the distribution of the return for a target policy using offline data generated by a different policy. The theoretical foundation of many existing work…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-13 Sungee Hong , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

As the era of large language models (LLMs) unfolds, Preference Optimization (PO) methods have become a central approach to aligning LLMs with human preferences and improving performance. We propose Maximum a Posteriori Preference…

In this paper, we study offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), where learning is based on pre-collected preference feedback over pairs of trajectories. While offline PbRL has demonstrated remarkable empirical success,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Hyungkyu Kang , Min-hwan Oh

Parallel thinking has emerged as a new paradigm for large reasoning models (LRMs) in tackling complex problems. Recent methods leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to enhance parallel thinking, aiming to address the limitations in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Qi Guo , Jianing Wang , Deyang Kong , Xiangyu Xi , Jianfei Zhang , Yi Lu , Jingang Wang , Wei Wang , Shikun Zhang , Wei Ye

Alignment of large language models (LLMs) has predominantly relied on pairwise preference optimization, where annotators select the better of two responses to a prompt. While simple, this approach overlooks the opportunity to learn from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Yuxuan Tang , Yifan Feng

Multi-turn human-AI collaboration is fundamental to deploying interactive services such as adaptive tutoring, conversational recommendation, and professional consultation. However, optimizing these interactions via reinforcement learning is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Haoyu Wang , Yuxin Chen , Liang Luo , Buyun Zhang , Ellie Dingqiao Wen , Pan Li

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE) of deterministic target policies for reinforcement learning (RL) in environments with continuous action spaces. While it is common to use importance sampling for OPE, it suffers from high variance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Haanvid Lee , Tri Wahyu Guntara , Jongmin Lee , Yung-Kyun Noh , Kee-Eung Kim

Offline imitation learning (offline IL) enables training effective policies without requiring explicit reward annotations. Recent approaches attempt to estimate rewards for unlabeled datasets using a small set of expert demonstrations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Shengjie Sun , Jiafei Lyu , Runze Liu , Mengbei Yan , Bo Liu , Deheng Ye , Xiu Li

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a powerful framework for training robotic agents using pre-collected, suboptimal datasets, eliminating the need for costly, time-consuming, and potentially hazardous online interactions. This is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Tung M. Luu , Donghoon Lee , Younghwan Lee , Chang D. Yoo

In offline-to-online reinforcement learning (O2O-RL), policies are first safely trained offline using previously collected datasets and then further fine-tuned for tasks via limited online interactions. In a typical O2O-RL pipeline,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Alper Kamil Bozkurt , Xiaoan Xu , Shangtong Zhang , Miroslav Pajic , Yuichi Motai

Offline preference optimization allows fine-tuning large models directly from offline data, and has proved effective in recent alignment practices. We propose generalized preference optimization (GPO), a family of offline losses…

Estimation of importance sampling weights for off-policy evaluation of contextual bandits often results in imbalance - a mismatch between the desired and the actual distribution of state-action pairs after weighting. In this work we present…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Arjun Sondhi , David Arbour , Drew Dimmery

This paper investigates the off-policy evaluation (OPE) problem from a distributional perspective. Rather than focusing solely on the expectation of the total return, as in most existing OPE methods, we aim to estimate the entire return…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-27 Qi Kuang , Chao Wang , Yuling Jiao , Fan Zhou

Off-Policy Estimation (OPE) methods allow us to learn and evaluate decision-making policies from logged data. This makes them an attractive choice for the offline evaluation of recommender systems, and several recent works have reported…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-11 Olivier Jeunen , Ben London

We study online preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) with the goal of improving sample efficiency. While a growing body of theoretical work has emerged-motivated by PbRL's recent empirical success, particularly in aligning large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Joongkyu Lee , Seouh-won Yi , Min-hwan Oh

Reward-based alignment methods for large language models (LLMs) face two key limitations: vulnerability to reward hacking, where models exploit flaws in the reward signal; and reliance on brittle, labor-intensive prompt engineering when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Zae Myung Kim , Chanwoo Park , Vipul Raheja , Suin Kim , Dongyeop Kang

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE), which evaluates the performance of a new policy from observed data collected from previous experiments, without requiring the execution of the new policy. This finds important applications in areas…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Yihao Feng , Tongzheng Ren , Ziyang Tang , Qiang Liu

We study the novel problem of future off-policy evaluation (F-OPE) and learning (F-OPL) for estimating and optimizing the future value of policies in non-stationary environments, where distributions vary over time. In e-commerce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Tatsuhiro Shimizu , Kazuki Kawamura , Takanori Muroi , Yusuke Narita , Kei Tateno , Takuma Udagawa , Yuta Saito

Post-training of LLMs with RLHF, and subsequently preference optimization algorithms such as DPO, IPO, etc., made a big difference in improving human alignment. However, all such techniques can only work with a single (human) objective. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Akhil Agnihotri , Rahul Jain , Deepak Ramachandran , Zheng Wen

Incorporating prior data into online reinforcement learning accelerates training but typically forces a difficult trade-off between high computational costs and long, multi-stage training pipelines. While fixed-length stabilization phases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Carlo Romeo , Girolamo Macaluso , Alessandro Sestini , Andrew D. Bagdanov