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Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) leverages a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence loss to stabilize training and prevent overfitting. However, in methods such as GRPO, its implementation may be guided by principles from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Kezhao Liu , Jason Klein Liu , Mingtao Chen , Yiming Liu

Motivated by alternating learning dynamics in two-player games, a recent work by Cevher et al.(2024) shows that $o(\sqrt{T})$ alternating regret is possible for any $T$-round adversarial Online Linear Optimization (OLO) problem, and left as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Soumita Hait , Ping Li , Haipeng Luo , Mengxiao Zhang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a cornerstone technique for post-training large language models. While most existing approaches rely on the reverse KL-regularization, recent empirical studies have begun…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Di Wu , Chengshuai Shi , Jing Yang , Cong Shen

Regret minimization is a powerful method for finding Nash equilibria in Normal-Form Games (NFGs) and Extensive-Form Games (EFGs), but it typically guarantees convergence only for the average strategy. However, computing the average strategy…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Hang Ren , Yulin Wu , Shuhan Qi , Jiajia Zhang , Xiaozhen Sun , Tianzi Ma , Xuan Wang

We study the model-based undiscounted reinforcement learning for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). The oracle we consider is the optimal policy of the POMDP with a known environment in terms of the average reward over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Yi Xiong , Ningyuan Chen , Xuefeng Gao , Xiang Zhou

The recently successful Munchausen Reinforcement Learning (M-RL) features implicit Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization by augmenting the reward function with logarithm of the current stochastic policy. Though significant improvement has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Lingwei Zhu , Zheng Chen , Eiji Uchibe , Takamitsu Matsubara

Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly employed for (interactive) decision-making, via the development of LLM-based autonomous agents. Despite their emerging successes, the performance of LLM agents in decision-making has not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Chanwoo Park , Xiangyu Liu , Asuman Ozdaglar , Kaiqing Zhang

Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL) regularization is widely used in reinforcement learning, but it becomes infinite under support mismatch and can degenerate in low-noise limits. Utilizing a unified information-geometric framework, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-03 Viktor Stein , Adwait Datar , Nihat Ay

Markov Games (MG) is an important model for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). It was long believed that the "curse of multi-agents" (i.e., the algorithmic performance drops exponentially with the number of agents) is unavoidable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Yan Dai , Qiwen Cui , Simon S. Du

We study the fundamental and timely problem of learning long sequences in autoregressive modeling and next-token prediction under model misspecification, measured by the joint Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence. Our goal is to characterize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yunbei Xu , Yuzhe Yuan , Ruohan Zhan

We study fast rates of convergence in the setting of nonparametric online regression, namely where regret is defined with respect to an arbitrary function class which has bounded complexity. Our contributions are two-fold: - In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-13 Constantinos Daskalakis , Noah Golowich

No-regret learning has been widely used to compute a Nash equilibrium in two-person zero-sum games. However, there is still a lack of regret analysis for network stochastic zero-sum games, where players competing in two subnetworks only…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-31 Shijie Huang , Jinlong Lei , Yiguang Hong

While quantum reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted a surge of attention recently, its theoretical understanding is limited. In particular, it remains elusive how to design provably efficient quantum RL algorithms that can address the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-06-14 Han Zhong , Jiachen Hu , Yecheng Xue , Tongyang Li , Liwei Wang

Self-play methods have demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing model capabilities across various domains. In the context of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), self-play not only boosts Large Language Model (LLM)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Mingzhi Wang , Chengdong Ma , Qizhi Chen , Linjian Meng , Yang Han , Jiancong Xiao , Zhaowei Zhang , Jing Huo , Weijie J. Su , Yaodong Yang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) or Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) are two key steps in the post-training of modern Language Models (LMs). A common problem is reward hacking, where the policy may exploit inaccuracies of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Johannes Ackermann , Michael Noukhovitch , Takashi Ishida , Masashi Sugiyama

We study the problem of full-information online learning in the "bounded recall" setting popular in the study of repeated games. An online learning algorithm $\mathcal{A}$ is $M$-$\textit{bounded-recall}$ if its output at time $t$ can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Jon Schneider , Kiran Vodrahalli

A dominant approach to solving large imperfect-information games is Counterfactural Regret Minimization (CFR). In CFR, many regret minimization problems are combined to solve the game. For very large games, abstraction is typically needed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-02 Ryan D'Orazio , Dustin Morrill , James R. Wright

Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) remains expensive, particularly because the rollout is expensive. Decoupling rollout generation from policy optimization (e.g., leveraging a more efficient model to rollout) could…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Zhuoming Chen , Hongyi Liu , Yang Zhou , Haizhong Zheng , Beidi Chen

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) agents typically learn world models by minimizing predictive loss. However, powerful RL optimizers inevitably exploit minor model inaccuracies, leading to simulator exploitation and a reality gap…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Christoph Dann , Yishay Mansour , Mehryar Mohri

Estimating the unknown reward functions driving agents' behaviors is of central interest in inverse reinforcement learning and game theory. To tackle this problem, we develop a unified framework for reward function recovery in two-player…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Junyi Liao , Zihan Zhu , Ethan Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Vahid Tarokh