Related papers: Post-Training with Policy Gradients: Optimality an…
There exist a number of reinforcement learning algorithms which learnby climbing the gradient of expected reward. Their long-runconvergence has been proved, even in partially observableenvironments with non-deterministic actions, and…
Specifying reward functions for complex tasks like object manipulation or driving is challenging to do by hand. Reward learning seeks to address this by learning a reward model using human feedback on selected query policies. This shifts…
In this work, we study the learning theory of reward modeling with pairwise comparison data using deep neural networks. We establish a novel non-asymptotic regret bound for deep reward estimators in a non-parametric setting, which depends…
Existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods for large language models have advanced rapidly, yet their design has largely been guided by heuristics rather than systematic theoretical principles. This gap limits our…
Language model (LM) alignment improves model outputs to reflect human preferences while preserving the capabilities of the base model. The most common alignment approaches are (i) reinforcement learning, which maximizes the expected reward…
We propose a lower bound on the log marginal likelihood of Gaussian process regression models that can be computed without matrix factorisation of the full kernel matrix. We show that approximate maximum likelihood learning of model…
Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…
We consider the problem of sequentially making decisions that are rewarded by "successes" and "failures" which can be predicted through an unknown relationship that depends on a partially controllable vector of attributes for each instance.…
Preference learning is critical for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, with the quality of preference datasets playing a crucial role in this process. While existing metrics primarily assess data quality based on…
For continuing environments, reinforcement learning (RL) methods commonly maximize the discounted reward criterion with discount factor close to 1 in order to approximate the average reward (the gain). However, such a criterion only…
We prove that, for finite-arm bandits with linear function approximation, the global convergence of policy gradient (PG) methods depends on inter-related properties between the policy update and the representation. textcolor{blue}{First},…
The difficulty in specifying rewards for many real-world problems has led to an increased focus on learning rewards from human feedback, such as demonstrations. However, there are often many different reward functions that explain the human…
Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems often have access to sparse rewards where the agent receives a reward signal only when it has achieved the goal, making policy optimization a difficult problem. Several works augment…
Post-training plays a crucial role in refining and aligning large language models to meet specific tasks and human preferences. While recent advancements in post-training techniques, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO),…
Process reward models (PRMs) provide more nuanced supervision compared to outcome reward models (ORMs) for optimizing policy models, positioning them as a promising approach to enhancing the capabilities of LLMs in complex reasoning tasks.…
Generative models form the backbone of modern machine learning, underpinning state-of-the-art systems in text, vision, and multimodal applications. While Maximum Likelihood Estimation has traditionally served as the dominant training…
Potential-based reward shaping is commonly used to incorporate prior knowledge of how to solve the task into reinforcement learning because it can formally guarantee policy invariance. As such, the optimal policy and the ordering of…
Training language models via reinforcement learning often relies on imperfect proxy rewards, since ground truth rewards that precisely define the intended behavior are rarely available. Standard metrics for assessing the quality of proxy…
Reinforcement learning with human feedback for aligning large language models (LLMs) trains a reward model typically using ranking loss with comparison pairs.However, the training procedure suffers from an inherent problem: the uncontrolled…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are the backbone of many reinforcement learning algorithms due to their good performance in policy optimization problems. As a gradient-based approach, PG methods typically rely on knowledge of the system…