Related papers: Post-Training with Policy Gradients: Optimality an…
In reinforcement learning from human feedback, preference-based reward models play a central role in aligning large language models to human-aligned behavior. However, recent studies show that these models are prone to reward hacking and…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great potential in refining robotic manipulation policies, yet its efficacy remains strongly bottlenecked by the difficulty of designing generalizable reward functions. In this paper, we propose a…
Learning reward models from pairwise comparisons is a fundamental component in a number of domains, including autonomous control, conversational agents, and recommendation systems, as part of a broad goal of aligning automated decisions…
Safety post-training can improve the harmfulness and policy compliance of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it may also reduce general utility, a phenomenon often described as the \emph{alignment tax}. We study this trade-off through the…
Policy-based methods have achieved remarkable success in solving challenging reinforcement learning problems. Among these methods, off-policy policy gradient methods are particularly important due to that they can benefit from off-policy…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable reward has recently emerged as a central paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs); however, prevailing mean-based methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), suffer from…
Reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome-based rewards has proven effective for improving large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, its success often depends on the base model occasionally sampling correct solutions.…
Policy gradient (PG) methods have played an essential role in the empirical successes of reinforcement learning. In order to handle large state-action spaces, PG methods are typically used with function approximation. In this setting, the…
State-of-the-art model-based reinforcement learning methods train policies on imagined rollouts. These rollouts are trajectories generated by a learned dynamics model and are scored by a learned reward model, but without querying the true…
Goal-conditioned policies enable decision-making models to execute diverse behaviors based on specified goals, yet their downstream performance is often highly sensitive to the choice of instructions or prompts. To bypass the limitations of…
Reinforcement Learning and Imitation Learning have achieved widespread success in many domains but remain constrained during real-world deployment. One of the main issues is the additional requirements that were not considered during…
We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…
Existing alignment methods directly use the reward model learned from user preference data to optimize an LLM policy, subject to KL regularization with respect to the base policy. This practice is suboptimal for maximizing user's utility…
This paper augments the reward received by a reinforcement learning agent with potential functions in order to help the agent learn (possibly stochastic) optimal policies. We show that a potential-based reward shaping scheme is able to…
We study the problem of learning to generate an answer (or completion) to a question (or prompt), where there could be multiple correct answers, any one of which is acceptable at test time. Learning is based on demonstrations of some…
Reinforcement learning algorithms are fundamental to align large language models with human preferences and to enhance their reasoning capabilities. However, current reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from training instability…
The inherent uncertainty in the environmental transition model of Reinforcement Learning (RL) necessitates a delicate balance between exploration and exploitation. This balance is crucial for optimizing computational resources to accurately…
Post-deployment machine learning algorithms often influence the environments they act in, and thus shift the underlying dynamics that the standard reinforcement learning (RL) methods ignore. While designing optimal algorithms in this…
To ensure that large language model (LLM) responses are helpful and non-toxic, a reward model trained on human preference data is usually used. LLM responses with high rewards are then selected through best-of-$n$ (BoN) sampling or the LLM…
During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…