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Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown remarkable success in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Traditional RLHF methods rely on a fixed dataset, which often suffers from limited coverage. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Long-Fei Li , Yu-Yang Qian , Peng Zhao , Zhi-Hua Zhou

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the predominant method for adapting large language models (LLMs), yet it often struggles with generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). In this work, we posit that this performance disparity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Rui Ming , Haoyuan Wu , Shoubo Hu , Zhuolun He , Bei Yu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained substantial attention across diverse application domains and theoretical investigations. Existing literature on RL theory largely focuses on risk-neutral settings where the decision-maker learns to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Zhengqi Wu , Renyuan Xu

Improving user retention with reinforcement learning~(RL) has attracted increasing attention due to its significant importance in boosting user engagement. However, training the RL policy from scratch without hurting users' experience is…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-03-14 Kesen Zhao , Lixin Zou , Xiangyu Zhao , Maolin Wang , Dawei yin

Recent progress in generative modeling has highlighted the importance of Reinforcement Learning (RL) for fine-tuning, with KL-regularized methods in particular proving to be highly effective for both autoregressive and diffusion models.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Tristan Deleu , Padideh Nouri , Yoshua Bengio , Doina Precup

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) models the full return distribution, but existing finite-support or quantile-based methods rely on projections, while recent flow-based approaches can suffer from \emph{boundary mismatch} at the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Boyang Xu , Qing Zou , Siqin Yang , Hao Yan

We introduce a new framework for web page ranking -- reinforcement ranking -- that improves the stability and accuracy of Page Rank while eliminating the need for computing the stationary distribution of random walks. Instead of relying on…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2013-03-26 Hengshuai Yao , Dale Schuurmans

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved impressive successes yet often requires a very large amount of interaction data. This result is perhaps unsurprising, as using complicated function approximation often requires more data to fit, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Jonathan N. Lee , Aldo Pacchiano , Vidya Muthukumar , Weihao Kong , Emma Brunskill

We prove performance guarantees of two algorithms for approximating $Q^\star$ in batch reinforcement learning. Compared to classical iterative methods such as Fitted Q-Iteration---whose performance loss incurs quadratic dependence on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Tengyang Xie , Nan Jiang

Recent theoretical work studies sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) extensively in two settings: learning interactively in the environment (online RL), or learning from an offline dataset (offline RL). However, existing algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-14 Tengyang Xie , Nan Jiang , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Yu Bai

Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) relies on fixed datasets where many potential goals share the same state and action spaces. However, these potential goals are not explicitly represented in the collected trajectories. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Wenyan Yang , Joni Pajarinen

Training models to effectively use test-time compute is crucial for improving the reasoning performance of LLMs. Current methods mostly do so via fine-tuning on search traces or running RL with 0/1 outcome reward, but do these approaches…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values. However, RLHF has been continuously challenged by its high complexity in implementation and computation consumption,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yuhao Du , Zhuo Li , Pengyu Cheng , Zhihong Chen , Yuejiao Xie , Xiang Wan , Anningzhe Gao

Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a central optimisation framework in machine learning. Although RL agents can converge to optimal solutions, the definition of ``optimality'' depends on the environment's statistical properties. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Bert Verbruggen , Arne Vanhoyweghen , Vincent Ginis

Bootstrapping and rollout are two fundamental principles for value function estimation in reinforcement learning (RL). We introduce a novel class of Bellman operators, called subgraph Bellman operators, that interpolate between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Wenlong Mou , Jian Qian

In this paper, we present a new approach to Transfer Learning (TL) in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for cross-domain tasks. Many of the available techniques approach the transfer architecture as a method of speeding up the target task…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-01-23 Girish Joshi , Girish Chowdhary

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) seeks reward-maximizing policies from static datasets under strict safety constraints. Existing methods often rely on soft expected-cost objectives or iterative generative inference, which can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Mumuksh Tayal , Manan Tayal , Ravi Prakash

Meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) has attracted attention due to its capability to enhance reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, in terms of data efficiency and generalizability. In this paper, we develop a bilevel optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Siyuan Xu , Minghui Zhu

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is challenged by the distributional shift between learning policies and datasets. To address this problem, existing works mainly focus on designing sophisticated algorithms to explicitly or implicitly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Yang Yue , Bingyi Kang , Xiao Ma , Zhongwen Xu , Gao Huang , Shuicheng Yan

We study online learning in episodic finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with convex objective functions, known as the concave utility reinforcement learning (CURL) problem. This setting generalizes RL from linear to convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Bianca Marin Moreno , Khaled Eldowa , Pierre Gaillard , Margaux Brégère , Nadia Oudjane