Related papers: Post-Training with Policy Gradients: Optimality an…
We propose a simple model selection approach for algorithms in stochastic bandit and reinforcement learning problems. As opposed to prior work that (implicitly) assumes knowledge of the optimal regret, we only require that each base…
Bandit optimization is a difficult problem, especially if the reward model is high-dimensional. When rewards are modeled by neural networks, sublinear regret has only been shown under strong assumptions, usually when the network is…
We study safe reinforcement learning in finite-horizon linear mixture constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with adversarial rewards under full-information feedback and an unknown transition kernel. We propose a primal-dual policy…
Reasoning abilities, especially those for solving complex math problems, are crucial components of general intelligence. Recent advances by proprietary companies, such as o-series models of OpenAI, have made remarkable progress on reasoning…
Reward modeling is not only a prediction problem: in KL-regularized policy optimization, the learned reward is exponentiated to define the deployed policy, so downstream value depends on errors in reward-tilted regions. We study this…
We formalize the problem of maximizing the mean-payoff value with high probability while satisfying a parity objective in a Markov decision process (MDP) with unknown probabilistic transition function and unknown reward function. Assuming…
Self-improvement through post-training methods such as iterative preference learning has been acclaimed for enhancing the problem-solving capabilities (e.g., mathematical reasoning) of Large Language Models (LLMs) without human…
Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms are among the best candidates for the much-anticipated applications of reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, such as robotics. However, the trial-and-error nature of these methods poses safety…
We study online reinforcement learning in average-reward stochastic games (SGs). An SG models a two-player zero-sum game in a Markov environment, where state transitions and one-step payoffs are determined simultaneously by a learner and an…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard approach for improving reasoning in language models, yet models trained with RLVR often suffer from diversity collapse: while single-sample accuracy improves,…
Transformers trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) with outcome-based supervision can spontaneously develop the ability to generate intermediate reasoning steps (Chain-of-Thought). Yet the mechanism by which sparse rewards drive policy…
This paper studies offline policy learning, which aims at utilizing observations collected a priori (from either fixed or adaptively evolving behavior policies) to learn an optimal individualized decision rule that achieves the best overall…
Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…
Recently, it has been shown that the Stochastic Gradient Bandit (SGB) algorithm converges to a globally optimal policy with a constant learning rate. However, these guarantees rely on unrealistic assumptions about the learning process,…
In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…
Recent progress in strengthening the capabilities of large language models has stemmed from applying reinforcement learning to domains with automatically verifiable outcomes. A key question is whether we can similarly use RL to optimize for…
The input to the stochastic orienteering problem consists of a budget $B$ and metric $(V,d)$ where each vertex $v$ has a job with deterministic reward and random processing time (drawn from a known distribution). The processing times are…
Policy gradient is an efficient technique for improving a policy in a reinforcement learning setting. However, vanilla online variants are on-policy only and not able to take advantage of off-policy data. In this paper we describe a new…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) can directly enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models without extensive reliance on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this work, we revisit the traditional Policy Gradient (PG) mechanism and…
World models predict state transitions in response to actions and are increasingly developed across diverse modalities. However, standard training objectives such as maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) often misalign with task-specific…