Related papers: Outcome-Based RL Provably Leads Transformers to Re…

Humans are masters at quickly learning many complex tasks, relying on an approximate understanding of the dynamics of their environments. In much the same way, we would like our learning agents to quickly adapt to new tasks. In this paper,…

Reinforcement learning (RL), a common tool in decision making, learns control policies from various experiences based on the associated cumulative return/rewards without treating them differently. Humans, on the contrary, often learn to…

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multi-step reasoning tasks. However, understandings of the underlying mechanisms by which they acquire these abilities through training remain limited, particularly from a…

We introduce a framework that abstracts Reinforcement Learning (RL) as a sequence modeling problem. This allows us to draw upon the simplicity and scalability of the Transformer architecture, and associated advances in language modeling…

Several recent works demonstrate that transformers can implement algorithms like gradient descent. By a careful construction of weights, these works show that multiple layers of transformers are expressive enough to simulate iterations of…

A key barrier to using reinforcement learning (RL) in many real-world applications is the requirement of a large number of system interactions to learn a good control policy. Off-policy and Offline RL methods have been proposed to reduce…

Reinforcement learning (RL) allows an agent interacting sequentially with an environment to maximize its long-term expected return. In the distributional RL (DistrRL) paradigm, the agent goes beyond the limit of the expected value, to…

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have proven transformative in a range of domains. To tackle real-world domains, these systems often use neural networks to learn policies directly from pixels or other high-dimensional sensory input.…

General reasoning represents a long-standing and formidable challenge in artificial intelligence. Recent breakthroughs, exemplified by large language models (LLMs) and chain-of-thought prompting, have achieved considerable success on…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been a main driver of recent breakthroughs in large reasoning models. Yet it remains a mystery how rewards based solely on final outcomes can help overcome the long-horizon barrier…

The remarkable capability of Transformers to do reasoning and few-shot learning, without any fine-tuning, is widely conjectured to stem from their ability to implicitly simulate a multi-step algorithms -- such as gradient descent -- with…

Current reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be brittle and difficult to use, especially when learning goal-reaching behaviors from sparse rewards. Although supervised imitation learning provides a simple and stable alternative, it…

Why do reinforcement learning (RL) policies fail or succeed? This is a challenging question due to the complex, high-dimensional nature of agent-environment interactions. In this work, we take a causal perspective on explaining the behavior…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently strengthened LLM reasoning, but its focus on final answer correctness leaves a critical gap: it does not ensure the robustness of the reasoning process itself. We adopt a…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a general framework for adaptive control, which has proven to be efficient in many domains, e.g., board games, video games or autonomous vehicles. In such problems, an agent faces a sequential decision-making…

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function. However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise. Can we devise RL algorithms that instead…

Everything else being equal, simpler models should be preferred over more complex ones. In reinforcement learning (RL), simplicity is typically quantified on an action-by-action basis -- but this timescale ignores temporal regularities,…

We present a two-step hybrid reinforcement learning (RL) policy that is designed to generate interpretable and robust hierarchical policies on the RL problem with graph-based input. Unlike prior deep reinforcement learning policies…

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems can be complex and non-interpretable, making it challenging for non-AI experts to understand or intervene in their decisions. This is due in part to the sequential nature of RL in which actions are chosen…

While reinforcement learning (RL) demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of language models, the training dynamics of RL in LLMs remain unclear. In this work, we provide an explanation of the RL training…