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Predictive modeling on tabular data is the cornerstone of many real-world applications. Although gradient boosting machines and some recent deep models achieve strong performance on tabular data, they often lack interpretability. On the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Tommy Xu , Zhitian Zhang , Xiangyu Sun , Lauren Kelly Zung , Hossein Hajimirsadeghi , Greg Mori

Bilevel optimization has become a powerful framework in various machine learning applications including meta-learning, hyperparameter optimization, and network architecture search. There are generally two classes of bilevel optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Kaiyi Ji

Providing a suitable reward function to reinforcement learning can be difficult in many real world applications. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) holds promise for automatically learning reward functions from demonstrations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Lantao Yu , Tianhe Yu , Chelsea Finn , Stefano Ermon

Gradient-based optimization has been critical to the success of machine learning, updating a single set of parameters to minimize a single loss. A growing number of applications rely on a generalization of this, where we have a bilevel or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Jonathan Lorraine

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a pivotal technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, yet it is susceptible to reward overoptimization, in which policy models overfit to the reward model,…

The outstanding capabilities of large language models (LLMs) render them a crucial component in various autonomous agent systems. While traditional methods depend on the inherent knowledge of LLMs without fine-tuning, more recent approaches…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Zhirui Deng , Zhicheng Dou , Yutao Zhu , Ji-Rong Wen , Ruibin Xiong , Mang Wang , Weipeng Chen

One of the challenges of aligning large models with human preferences lies in both the data requirements and the technical complexities of current approaches. Predominant methods, such as RLHF, involve multiple steps, each demanding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Siliang Zeng , Yao Liu , Huzefa Rangwala , George Karypis , Mingyi Hong , Rasool Fakoor

The optimal objective is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how policies are evaluated and optimized. While total return maximization is the ideal objective in RL, discounted return maximization is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Shuyu Yin , Fei Wen , Peilin Liu , Tao Luo

Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-10 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

Bi-Level Optimization (BLO) is originated from the area of economic game theory and then introduced into the optimization community. BLO is able to handle problems with a hierarchical structure, involving two levels of optimization tasks,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Risheng Liu , Jiaxin Gao , Jin Zhang , Deyu Meng , Zhouchen Lin

Bilevel optimization enjoys a wide range of applications in emerging machine learning and signal processing problems such as hyper-parameter optimization, image reconstruction, meta-learning, adversarial training, and reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-08 Han Shen , Quan Xiao , Tianyi Chen

Evolutionary reinforcement learning (ERL) algorithms recently raise attention in tackling complex reinforcement learning (RL) problems due to high parallelism, while they are prone to insufficient exploration or model collapse without…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-08-03 Junyi Wang , Yuanyang Zhu , Zhi Wang , Yan Zheng , Jianye Hao , Chunlin Chen

Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shifted from pre-training scaling to post-training and test-time scaling. Across these developments, a key unified paradigm has arisen: Learning from Rewards, where reward signals act…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Xiaobao Wu

This paper reviews gradient-based techniques to solve bilevel optimization problems. Bilevel optimization is a general way to frame the learning of systems that are implicitly defined through a quantity that they minimize. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Nicolas Zucchet , João Sacramento

Reward design plays a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, serving as the bridge between feedback signals and model optimization. This survey provides a structured organization of reward modeling and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Miaomiao Ji , Yanqiu Wu , Zhibin Wu , Shoujin Wang , Jian Yang , Mark Dras , Usman Naseem

The ability of reinforcement learning algorithms to learn effective policies is determined by the rewards available during training. However, for practical problems, obtaining large quantities of reward labels is often infeasible due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Shreyas Chaudhari , Renhao Zhang , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

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

Bilevel optimization has found successful applications in various machine learning problems, including hyper-parameter optimization, data cleaning, and meta-learning. However, its huge computational cost presents a significant challenge for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Xiaoyu Wang , Rui Pan , Renjie Pi , Jipeng Zhang

Optimization of hyper-parameters in reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is a key task, because they determine how the agent will learn its policy by interacting with its environment, and thus what data is gathered. In this work, an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-19 Juan Cruz Barsce , Jorge A. Palombarini , Ernesto Martínez

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is the predominant algorithm for training text generation models. This paradigm relies on direct supervision examples, which is not applicable to many emerging applications, such as generating adversarial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Han Guo , Bowen Tan , Zhengzhong Liu , Eric P. Xing , Zhiting Hu