Related papers: Approximation of Log-Partition Function in Policy …
It is well known that mirror descent may diverge or cycle on merely monotone variational inequalities. In this paper, we propose \emph{Target Mirror Descent} (TMD), a unified framework that stabilizes monotone flows via a target point…
Model-based offline reinforcement learning methods (RL) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in many decision-making problems thanks to their sample efficiency and generalizability. Despite these advancements, existing model-based…
Recent work by Woodworth et al. (2020) shows that the optimization dynamics of gradient descent for overparameterized problems can be viewed as low-dimensional dual dynamics induced by a mirror map, explaining the implicit regularization…
We study the problem of efficiently estimating policies that simultaneously optimize multiple objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). Given $n$ objectives (or tasks), we seek the optimal partition of these objectives into $k \ll n$…
To overcome the curse of dimensionality and curse of modeling in Dynamic Programming (DP) methods for solving classical Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are popular. In this paper, we consider…
Markov Decision Processes are classically solved using Value Iteration and Policy Iteration algorithms. Recent interest in Reinforcement Learning has motivated the study of methods inspired by optimization, such as gradient ascent. Among…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in a wide range of control and decision-making tasks. However, RL agents often exhibit unstable or degraded performance when deployed in environments subject to unexpected external…
Online mirror descent (OMD) is a fundamental algorithmic paradigm that underlies many algorithms in optimization, machine learning and sequential decision-making. The OMD iterates are defined as solutions to optimization subproblems which,…
The success of popular algorithms for deep reinforcement learning, such as policy-gradients and Q-learning, relies heavily on the availability of an informative reward signal at each timestep of the sequential decision-making process. When…
Tool-integrated (TI) reinforcement learning (RL) enables large language models (LLMs) to perform multi-step reasoning by interacting with external tools such as search engines and retrievers. Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO),…
We propose a general framework for entropy-regularized average-reward reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our approach is based on extending the linear-programming formulation of policy optimization in MDPs to…
We study the reinforcement learning (RL) problem in a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), where an agent explores the environment to maximize the expected cumulative reward while satisfying a single constraint on the expected total…
Policy evaluation with linear function approximation is an important problem in reinforcement learning. When facing high-dimensional feature spaces, such a problem becomes extremely hard considering the computation efficiency and quality of…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has been receiving increasingly more attention thanks to its encouraging performance on a variety of control tasks. Yet, conventional regularization techniques in training neural networks (e.g., $L_2$…
Regularized Markov Decision Processes serve as models of sequential decision making under uncertainty wherein the decision maker has limited information processing capacity and/or aversion to model ambiguity. With functional approximation,…
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…
Learning Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the presence of the adversary is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we study RL in episodic MDPs with adversarial reward and full information feedback, where the…
Preference-conditioned multi-objective reinforcement learning aims to learn a single policy that captures trade-offs across preferences, but under nonlinear scalarization the uniqueness and continuity of the preference-to-solution…
Evaluating preference optimization (PO) algorithms on LLM alignment is a challenging task that presents prohibitive costs, noise, and several variables like model size and hyper-parameters. In this work, we show that it is possible to gain…
This work studies knowledge distillation (KD) for large language models (LLMs) through preference optimization. We propose a reward-guided imitation learning framework for sequential KD, formulating a min-max optimization problem between…