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Language Models (LMs) exhibit two distinct mechanisms for knowledge acquisition: in-weights learning (i.e., encoding information within the model weights) and in-context learning (ICL). Although these two modes offer complementary…
Temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation (linear TD) is a classic and powerful prediction algorithm in reinforcement learning. While it is well-understood that linear TD converges almost surely to a unique point,…
In Reinforcement Learning (RL), an agent acts in an unknown environment to maximize the expected cumulative discounted sum of an external reward signal, i.e., the expected return. In practice, in many tasks of interest, such as policy…
In this paper, we study the Temporal Difference (TD) learning with linear value function approximation. It is well known that most TD learning algorithms are unstable with linear function approximation and off-policy learning. Recent…
Deploying models on target domain data subject to distribution shift requires adaptation. Test-time training (TTT) emerges as a solution to this adaptation under a realistic scenario where access to full source domain data is not available…
The adaptation of large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) through post-training reveals a pronounced generalization gap: models fine-tuned with Reinforcement Learning (RL) consistently achieve superior out-of-distribution (OOD)…
In recent years deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems have attained superhuman performance in a number of challenging task domains. However, a major limitation of such applications is their demand for massive amounts of training data. A…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in training large language models (LLMs) for preventing unexpected outputs, eg reducing harmfulness and errors. However, existing RL methods mostly adopt the instance-level reward, which is…
The recent emergence of reinforcement learning has created a demand for robust statistical inference methods for the parameter estimates computed using these algorithms. Existing methods for statistical inference in online learning are…
The ability to effectively reuse prior knowledge is a key requirement when building general and flexible Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents. Skill reuse is one of the most common approaches, but current methods have considerable…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a sub-domain of machine learning, mainly concerned with solving sequential decision-making problems by a learning agent that interacts with the decision environment to improve its behavior through the reward…
Value functions are a central component of deep reinforcement learning (RL). These functions, parameterized by neural networks, are trained using a mean squared error regression objective to match bootstrapped target values. However,…
Temporal-difference and Q-learning play a key role in deep reinforcement learning, where they are empowered by expressive nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. At the core of their empirical successes is the learned…
We study the multi-step off-policy learning approach to distributional RL. Despite the apparent similarity between value-based RL and distributional RL, our study reveals intriguing and fundamental differences between the two cases in the…
We are interested in understanding stability (almost sure boundedness) of stochastic approximation algorithms (SAs) driven by a `controlled Markov' process. Analyzing this class of algorithms is important, since many reinforcement learning…
Provably sample-efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL) with rich observations and function approximation has witnessed tremendous recent progress, particularly when the underlying function approximators are linear. In this linear regime,…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can learn better decision-making compared to behavior policies by stitching the suboptimal trajectories to derive more optimal ones. Meanwhile, Decision Transformer (DT) abstracts the RL as…
Multi-task learning (MTL) seeks to improve the generalized performance of learning specific tasks, exploiting useful information incorporated in related tasks. As a promising area, this paper studies an MTL-based control approach…
Temporal-difference learning (TD), coupled with neural networks, is among the most fundamental building blocks of deep reinforcement learning. However, due to the nonlinearity in value function approximation, such a coupling leads to…
We discuss the approximation of the value function for infinite-horizon discounted Markov Reward Processes (MRP) with nonlinear functions trained with the Temporal-Difference (TD) learning algorithm. We first consider this problem under a…