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Related papers: LLMs Can Learn to Reason Via Off-Policy RL

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We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the aim is to estimate the performance of a new policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy, or policies. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-16 Aurélien F. Bibaut , Ivana Malenica , Nikos Vlassis , Mark J. van der Laan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated its potential to improve the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). One major limitation of most existing Reinforcement Finetuning (RFT) methods is that they are on-policy RL in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Jing Liang , Hongyao Tang , Yi Ma , Jinyi Liu , Yan Zheng , Shuyue Hu , Lei Bai , Jianye Hao

Large language models (LLMs) have recently advanced in reasoning when optimized with reinforcement learning (RL) under verifiable rewards. Existing methods primarily rely on outcome-based supervision to strengthen internal LLM reasoning,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Siyao Song , Cong Ma , Zhihao Cheng , Shiye Lei , Minghao Li , Ying Zeng , Huaixiao Tou , Kai Jia

Offline imitation learning (offline IL) enables training effective policies without requiring explicit reward annotations. Recent approaches attempt to estimate rewards for unlabeled datasets using a small set of expert demonstrations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Shengjie Sun , Jiafei Lyu , Runze Liu , Mengbei Yan , Bo Liu , Deheng Ye , Xiu Li

Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Alexander W. Goodall , Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli

Most deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems are not able to learn effectively from off-policy data, especially if they cannot explore online in the environment. These are critical shortcomings for applying RL to real-world problems where…

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-21 Kate Rakelly , Aurick Zhou , Deirdre Quillen , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), encounter the challenge of distribution shift. Current approaches typically address this issue…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Qiyuan Deng , Xuefeng Bai , Kehai Chen , Yaowei Wang , Liqiang Nie , Min Zhang

Despite significant advances in long-context reasoning by large language models (LLMs), primarily through Online Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods, these approaches incur substantial computational costs and complexity. In contrast,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Xiaoyu Tian , Sitong Zhao , Haotian Wang , Shuaiting Chen , Yiping Peng , Yunjie Ji , Han Zhao , Xiangang Li

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a promising solution to align large language models (LLMs) more closely with human values. Off-policy preference optimization, where the preference data is obtained from other models, is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Wenxuan Zhou , Ravi Agrawal , Shujian Zhang , Sathish Reddy Indurthi , Sanqiang Zhao , Kaiqiang Song , Silei Xu , Chenguang Zhu

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) refers to the problem of learning policies entirely from a large batch of previously collected data. This problem setting offers the promise of utilizing such datasets to acquire policies without any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Tianhe Yu , Garrett Thomas , Lantao Yu , Stefano Ermon , James Zou , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn , Tengyu Ma

Learning complex policies with Reinforcement Learning (RL) is often hindered by instability and slow convergence, a problem exacerbated by the difficulty of reward engineering. Imitation Learning (IL) from expert demonstrations bypasses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Sayambhu Sen , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is attractive in scenarios where reward engineering can be tedious. However, prior IRL algorithms use on-policy transitions, which require intensive sampling from the current policy for stable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Hana Hoshino , Kei Ota , Asako Kanezaki , Rio Yokota

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods can generally be categorized into two types: RL-based and Imitation-based. RL-based methods could in principle enjoy out-of-distribution generalization but suffer from erroneous off-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-06 Haoran Xu , Li Jiang , Jianxiong Li , Xianyuan Zhan

This paper prescribes a suite of techniques for off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) that simplify the training process and reduce the sample complexity. First, we show that simple Deterministic Policy Gradient works remarkably well as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Rasool Fakoor , Pratik Chaudhari , Alexander J. Smola

Offline policy learning is aimed at learning decision-making policies using existing datasets of trajectories without collecting additional data. The primary motivation for using reinforcement learning (RL) instead of supervised learning…

Improving the multi-step reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) with offline reinforcement learning (RL) is essential for quickly adapting them to complex tasks. While Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has shown promise in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Huaijie Wang , Shibo Hao , Hanze Dong , Shenao Zhang , Yilin Bao , Ziran Yang , Yi Wu

We propose a new algorithm for fine-tuning large language models using reinforcement learning. Tapered Off-Policy REINFORCE (TOPR) uses an asymmetric, tapered variant of importance sampling to speed up learning while maintaining stable…

RL-based post-training of language models is almost exclusively done using on-policy methods such as PPO. These methods cannot learn from arbitrary sequences such as those produced earlier in training, in earlier runs, by human experts or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Taco Cohen , David W. Zhang , Kunhao Zheng , Yunhao Tang , Remi Munos , Gabriel Synnaeve

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) looks at learning how to optimally solve tasks using a fixed dataset of interactions from the environment. Many off-policy algorithms developed for online learning struggle in the offline setting as they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Natinael Solomon Neggatu , Jeremie Houssineau , Giovanni Montana