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Existing score-based methods for inverse problems often resort to approximate minimization of the KL divergence between the inversion distribution and the Bayesian posterior. Such an approximation leads to severe mode collapse and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Weimin Bai , Yuxuan Gu , Yifei Wang , Weijian Luo , He Sun

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a key method for improving Large Language Models' reasoning capabilities, yet recent evidence suggests it may paradoxically shrink the reasoning boundary rather than…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Phuc Minh Nguyen , Chinh D. La , Duy M. H. Nguyen , Nitesh V. Chawla , Binh T. Nguyen , Khoa D. Doan

Identifying statistical regularities in solutions to some tasks in multi-task reinforcement learning can accelerate the learning of new tasks. Skill learning offers one way of identifying these regularities by decomposing pre-collected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-12 Yiding Jiang , Evan Zheran Liu , Benjamin Eysenbach , Zico Kolter , Chelsea Finn

This paper proposes a novel formulation for reinforcement learning (RL) with large language models, explaining why and under what conditions the true sequence-level reward can be optimized via a surrogate token-level objective in policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Chujie Zheng , Kai Dang , Bowen Yu , Mingze Li , Huiqiang Jiang , Junrong Lin , Yuqiong Liu , Hao Lin , Chencan Wu , Feng Hu , An Yang , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in many scenarios. However, it typically requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, some of which may be unsafe. Consequently, its application to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-24 Yousef Emam , Gennaro Notomista , Paul Glotfelter , Zsolt Kira , Magnus Egerstedt

A major challenge of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world applications is the variation between environments, tasks or clients. Meta-RL (MRL) addresses this issue by learning a meta-policy that adapts to new tasks. Standard MRL methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Ido Greenberg , Shie Mannor , Gal Chechik , Eli Meirom

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has achieved remarkable success in logical reasoning tasks, yet whether large language model (LLM) alignment requires fundamentally different approaches remains unclear. Given the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Zhaowei Zhang , Xiaohan Liu , Xuekai Zhu , Junchao Huang , Ceyao Zhang , Zhiyuan Feng , Yaodong Yang , Xiaoyuan Yi , Xing Xie

Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have substantially enhanced the planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the theoretical basis for their effectiveness remains elusive. In this work, we investigate RL's benefits…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Siwei Wang , Yifei Shen , Haoran Sun , Shi Feng , Shang-Hua Teng , Li Dong , Yaru Hao , Wei Chen

In recent years, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been applied to real-world problems with increasing success. Such applications often require to put constraints on the agent's behavior. Existing algorithms for constrained RL (CRL) rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Ted Moskovitz , Brendan O'Donoghue , Vivek Veeriah , Sebastian Flennerhag , Satinder Singh , Tom Zahavy

Reasoning large language models (LLMs) excel in complex tasks, which has drawn significant attention to reinforcement learning (RL) for LLMs. However, existing approaches allocate an equal number of rollouts to all questions during the RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Mengqi Liao , Xiangyu Xi , Ruinian Chen , Jia Leng , Yangen Hu , Ke Zeng , Shuai Liu , Huaiyu Wan

Reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based regularization with respect to a fixed reference policy is widely used in modern reinforcement learning to preserve the desired traits of the reference policy and sometimes to promote…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Anupam Nayak , Tong Yang , Osman Yagan , Gauri Joshi , Yuejie Chi

Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has been widely adapted due to its sample efficiency. However, existing worst-case regret analysis typically requires optimistic planning, which is not realistic in general. In contrast, motivated…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-10 Lingxiao Wang , Ping Li

Given a question, a language model (LM) implicitly encodes a distribution over possible answers. In practice, post-training procedures for LMs often collapse this distribution onto a single dominant mode. While this is generally not a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Isha Puri , Mehul Damani , Idan Shenfeld , Marzyeh Ghassemi , Jacob Andreas , Yoon Kim

Reinforcement learning is used to align language models with human preference signals after first pre-training the model to predict the next token of text within a large corpus using likelihood maximization. Before being deployed in a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Alec Solway

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have exhibited great potential in solving single-task sequential decision-making problems with high-dimensional observations and long horizons, but are known to be hard to generalize across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Boyuan Chen , Chuning Zhu , Pulkit Agrawal , Kaiqing Zhang , Abhishek Gupta

Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning with KL-regularized objectives can enjoy faster rates of convergence or logarithmic regret, in contrast to the classical $\sqrt{T}$-type regret in the unregularized setting. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Kaixuan Ji , Qingyue Zhao , Heyang Zhao , Qiwei Di , Quanquan Gu

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is highly effective for post-training autoregressive (AR) language models, yet its direct application to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) often triggers reward collapse. We identify two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Jianyuan Zhong , Kaibo Wang , Ding Ding , Zijin Feng , Haoli Bai , Yang Xiang , Jiacheng Sun , Qiang Xu

In reinforcement learning (RL), the consideration of multivariate reward signals has led to fundamental advancements in multi-objective decision-making, transfer learning, and representation learning. This work introduces the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Harley Wiltzer , Jesse Farebrother , Arthur Gretton , Mark Rowland

We introduce a new algorithm for multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) with linear preferences, with the goal of enabling few-shot adaptation to new tasks. In MORL, the aim is to learn policies over multiple competing objectives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-07 Runzhe Yang , Xingyuan Sun , Karthik Narasimhan