Related papers: Does This Gradient Spark Joy?
Policy gradient methods are a vital ingredient behind the success of modern reinforcement learning. Modern policy gradient methods, although successful, introduce a residual error in gradient estimation. In this work, we argue that this…
Differential privacy (DP) in deep learning is a critical concern as it ensures the confidentiality of training data while maintaining model utility. Existing DP training algorithms provide privacy guarantees by clipping and then injecting…
Policy gradient methods have become one of the most popular classes of algorithms for multi-agent reinforcement learning. A key challenge, however, that is not addressed by many of these methods is multi-agent credit assignment: assessing…
In reinforcement learning, temporal difference (TD) is the most direct algorithm to learn the value function of a policy. For large or infinite state spaces, exact representations of the value function are usually not available, and it must…
The ability to train high-performing reward models with few-shot data is critical for enhancing the efficiency and scalability of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). We propose a data augmentation and expansion framework that…
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.…
Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…
The idea of federated learning is to collaboratively train a neural network on a server. Each user receives the current weights of the network and in turns sends parameter updates (gradients) based on local data. This protocol has been…
On-policy self-distillation, where a student is pulled toward a copy of itself conditioned on privileged context (e.g., a verified solution or feedback), offers a promising direction for advancing reasoning capability without a stronger…
On-policy self-distillation (self-OPD) densifies reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) by letting a policy teach itself under privileged context. We find that when this guidance spans the full response, all-token KL spends…
We experimented with front-end enhanced neural models where a differentiable and fully convolutional model with a skip connection is added before a frozen backbone classifier. By training such composite models using a small learning rate…
Bandit algorithms are guaranteed to solve diverse sequential decision-making problems, provided that a sufficient exploration budget is available. However, learning from scratch is often too costly for personalization tasks where a single…
In this paper, we provide a novel analytical perspective on the theoretical understanding of gradient-based learning algorithms by interpreting consensus-based optimization (CBO), a recently proposed multi-particle derivative-free…
Numerous algorithms have been proposed to $\textit{align}$ language models to remove undesirable behaviors. However, the challenges associated with a very large state space and creating a proper reward function often result in various…
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely used for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, but it often suffers from advantage collapse: when all rollouts in a group receive the same reward, the group yields zero relative…
We consider a policy gradient algorithm applied to a finite-arm bandit problem with Bernoulli rewards. We allow learning rates to depend on the current state of the algorithm, rather than use a deterministic time-decreasing learning rate.…
We study the pricing behavior of third-party platforms facing strategic agents. Assuming the platform is a revenue maximizer, it observes market features that generally affect demand. Since only the equilibrium price and quantity are…
Decision-Focused Learning (DFL) trains predictors to improve downstream decision quality, but computing regret gradients typically requires differentiating through solvers or relying on surrogate losses, which can be computationally…
Conventionally, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is treated as a simple imitation learning process that only trains a policy to imitate expert behavior on demonstration datasets. In this work, we challenge this view by establishing a…
Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning agents can develop policies that exploit spurious correlations between rewards and observations. This phenomenon, known as policy confounding, arises because the agent's policy influences…