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Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) is a promising framework for learning control in a data-efficient manner. MBRL algorithms can be fairly complex due to the separate dynamics modeling and the subsequent planning algorithm, and as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Baohe Zhang , Raghu Rajan , Luis Pineda , Nathan Lambert , André Biedenkapp , Kurtland Chua , Frank Hutter , Roberto Calandra

DPO (Direct Preference Optimization) has become a widely used offline preference optimization algorithm due to its simplicity and training stability. However, DPO is prone to overfitting and collapse. To address these challenges, we propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Rui Wang , Qianguo Sun , Chao Song , Junlong Wu , Tianrong Chen , Zhiyun Zeng , Yu Li

Enhancing the conformity of large language models (LLMs) to human preferences remains an ongoing research challenge. Recently, offline approaches such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have gained prominence as attractive options due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Kaihui Chen , Hao Yi , Qingyang Li , Tianyu Qi , Yulan Hu , Fuzheng Zhang , Yong Liu

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to align with human preferences has driven the success of systems such as Gemini and ChatGPT. However, approaches like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) remain computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Miria Feng , Mert Pilanci

Dynamic hedging is a financial strategy that consists in periodically transacting one or multiple financial assets to offset the risk associated with a correlated liability. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have been used to…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-04-18 Andrei Neagu , Frédéric Godin , Leila Kosseim

Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the careful design of the reward function. However, accurately assigning rewards to each state-action pair in Long-Term Reinforcement Learning (LTRL) tasks remains a significant challenge. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Qi Ju , Falin Hei , Zhemei Fang , Yunfeng Luo

Efficient preference optimization algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have become a popular approach in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. These algorithms implicitly treat the LLM as a reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Tong Liu , Xiao Yu , Wenxuan Zhou , Jindong Gu , Volker Tresp

Alignment is a crucial step to enhance the instruction-following and conversational abilities of language models. Despite many recent work proposing new algorithms, datasets, and training pipelines, there is a lack of comprehensive studies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Xiao Yu , Qingyang Wu , Yu Li , Zhou Yu

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

Post-training paradigms for Large Language Models (LLMs), primarily Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), face a fundamental dilemma: SFT provides stability (low variance) but suffers from high fitting bias, while RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Taojie Zhu , Dongyang Xu , Ding Zou , Sen Zhao , Qiaobo Hao , Zhiguo Yang , Yonghong He

Alignment is vital for safely deploying large language models (LLMs). Existing techniques are either reward-based (training a reward model on preference pairs and optimizing with reinforcement learning) or reward-free (directly fine-tuning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ruoxi Cheng , Haoxuan Ma , Weixin Wang , Ranjie Duan , Jiexi Liu , Xiaoshuang Jia , Simeng Qin , Xiaochun Cao , Yang Liu , Xiaojun Jia

Reinforcement Learning (RL) robot controllers usually aggregate many task objectives into one scalar reward. While large-scale proximal policy optimisation (PPO) has enabled impressive results such as robust robot locomotion in the real…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Humphrey Munn , Brendan Tidd , Peter Böhm , Marcus Gallagher , David Howard

We evaluate benchmark deep reinforcement learning algorithms on the task of portfolio optimisation using simulated data. The simulator to generate the data is based on correlated geometric Brownian motion with the Bertsimas-Lo market impact…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Chung I Lu

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has significantly advanced parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large pretrained models. LoRA augments the pre-trained weights of a model by adding the product of two smaller matrices that together form a low-rank…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-09 David Bensaïd , Noam Rotstein , Roy Velich , Daniel Bensaïd , Ron Kimmel

With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), numerous Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) algorithms have been introduced to improve model safety and alignment with human preferences. These algorithms can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Xuerui Su , Yue Wang , Jinhua Zhu , Mingyang Yi , Feng Xu , Zhiming Ma , Yuting Liu

Online alignment (e.g., GRPO) is generally more performant than offline alignment (e.g., DPO) -- but why? Drawing on prospect theory from behavioral economics, we propose a human-centric explanation. We prove that online on-policy sampling…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Sijia Liu , Niklas Muennighoff , Kawin Ethayarajh

Process reward models (PRMs) allow for fine-grained credit assignment in reinforcement learning (RL), and seemingly contrast with outcome reward models (ORMs), which assign a single reward to an entire trajectory. However, we provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Michael Sullivan , Alexander Koller

Post-training processes are essential phases in grounding pre-trained language models to real-world tasks, with learning from demonstrations or preference signals playing a crucial role in this adaptation. We present a unified theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Bo Wang , Qinyuan Cheng , Runyu Peng , Rong Bao , Peiji Li , Qipeng Guo , Linyang Li , Zhiyuan Zeng , Yunhua Zhou , Xipeng Qiu

Recent advancements in post-training methodologies for large language models (LLMs) have highlighted reinforcement learning (RL) as a critical component for enhancing reasoning. However, the substantial computational costs associated with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Songjun Tu , Jiahao Lin , Xiangyu Tian , Qichao Zhang , Linjing Li , Yuqian Fu , Nan Xu , Wei He , Xiangyuan Lan , Dongmei Jiang , Dongbin Zhao

We study the \textit{parameter placement problem}: given a fixed budget of $k$ trainable entries within the B matrix of a LoRA adapter (A frozen), does the choice of which $k$ matter? Under supervised fine-tuning, random and informed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Arijit Sehanobish , Charles Lovering