Related papers: Post-Training with Policy Gradients: Optimality an…
We study the problem of online learning in adversarial bandit problems under a partial observability model called off-policy feedback. In this sequential decision making problem, the learner cannot directly observe its rewards, but instead…
We study a common challenge in reinforcement learning for large language models (LLMs): the Zero-Reward Assumption, where non-terminal actions (i.e., intermediate token generations) receive zero task-specific immediate reward, while only…
We propose a large margin criterion for training neural language models. Conventionally, neural language models are trained by minimizing perplexity (PPL) on grammatical sentences. However, we demonstrate that PPL may not be the best metric…
We develop a neural-network framework for multi-period risk--reward stochastic control problems with constrained two-step feedback policies that may be discontinuous in the state. We allow a broad class of objectives built on a…
Motivated by applications to online advertising and recommender systems, we consider a game-theoretic model with delayed rewards and asynchronous, payoff-based feedback. In contrast to previous work on delayed multi-armed bandits, we focus…
Learning a transition model via Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) followed by planning inside the learned model is perhaps the most standard and simplest Model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework. In this work, we show that such a…
In reinforcement learning, specifying reward functions that capture the intended task can be very challenging. Reward learning aims to address this issue by learning the reward function. However, a learned reward model may have a low error…
In performative prediction, the deployment of a predictive model triggers a shift in the data distribution. As these shifts are typically unknown ahead of time, the learner needs to deploy a model to get feedback about the distribution it…
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on reasoning benchmarks via reinforcement learning requires a specific reward function, often binary, for each benchmark. This comes with two potential limitations: the need to design the reward, and…
In the field of reinforcement learning there has been recent progress towards safety and high-confidence bounds on policy performance. However, to our knowledge, no practical methods exist for determining high-confidence policy performance…
Reinforcement learning lies at the intersection of several challenges. Many applications of interest involve extremely large state spaces, requiring function approximation to enable tractable computation. In addition, the learner has only a…
The statistical framework of Generalized Linear Models (GLM) can be applied to sequential problems involving categorical or ordinal rewards associated, for instance, with clicks, likes or ratings. In the example of binary rewards, logistic…
Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning are a successful approach for a variety of reasons: they are model free, they directly optimize the performance metric of interest, and they allow for richly parameterized policies.…
Reinforcement learning for LLMs is vulnerable to reward hacking, where models exploit shortcuts to maximize reward without solving the intended task. We systematically study this phenomenon in coding tasks using an environment-manipulation…
Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…
While standard reinforcement learning optimizes a single reward signal, many applications require optimizing a nonlinear utility $f(J_1^\pi,\dots,J_M^\pi)$ over multiple objectives, where each $J_m^\pi$ denotes the expected discounted…
In aligning large language models (LLMs), reward models have played an important role, but are standardly trained as discriminative models and rely only on labeled human preference data. In this paper, we explore methods that train reward…
In this paper, we consider the problem of learning safe policies for probabilistic-constrained reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, a safe policy or controller is one that, with high probability, maintains the trajectory of the agent…
In this paper, we study the problem of regret minimization for episodic Reinforcement Learning (RL) both in the model-free and the model-based setting. We focus on learning with general function classes and general model classes, and we…
Reinforcement learning usually uses the feedback rewards of environmental to train agents. But the rewards in the actual environment are sparse, and even some environments will not rewards. Most of the current methods are difficult to get…