Related papers: Does This Gradient Spark Joy?
We develop a method for policy architecture search and adaptation via gradient-free optimization which can learn to perform autonomous driving tasks. By learning from both demonstration and environmental reward we develop a model that can…
Recent advancements in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), exemplified by DeepSeek-R1, have underscored the potential of scaling inference-time compute through Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). However, GRPO frequently suffers from…
Policy gradient methods are very attractive in reinforcement learning due to their model-free nature and convergence guarantees. These methods, however, suffer from high variance in gradient estimation, resulting in poor sample efficiency.…
We present a design called Proof of Gradient Optimization (PoGO) for blockchain consensus, where miners produce verifiable evidence of training large-scale machine-learning models. Building on previous work, we incorporate quantized…
We study post-training linear autoregressive models with outcome and process rewards. Given a context $\boldsymbol{x}$, the model must predict the response $\boldsymbol{y} \in Y^N$, a sequence of length $N$ that satisfies a $\gamma$ margin…
GRPO is a standard approach to endowing pretrained LLMs with reasoning capabilities. It estimates the advantage of an outcome from a group of $K$ outcomes, and promotes those with positive advantages inside a trust region. Since GRPO…
We study the relative power of learning with gradient descent on differentiable models, such as neural networks, versus using the corresponding tangent kernels. We show that under certain conditions, gradient descent achieves small error…
Pass@k is a widely used performance metric for verifiable large language model tasks, including mathematical reasoning, code generation, and short-answer reasoning. It defines success if any of $k$ independently sampled solutions passes a…
We study two procedures (reverse-mode and forward-mode) for computing the gradient of the validation error with respect to the hyperparameters of any iterative learning algorithm such as stochastic gradient descent. These procedures mirror…
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a standard algorithm for reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards, but its group-mean-centered advantage can fail under binary rewards. The failure mode is gradient starvation: when every…
Model-free and model-based reinforcement learning are two ends of a spectrum. Learning a good policy without a dynamic model can be prohibitively expensive. Learning the dynamic model of a system can reduce the cost of learning the policy,…
We consider the well-studied dueling bandit problem, where a learner aims to identify near-optimal actions using pairwise comparisons, under the constraint of differential privacy. We consider a general class of utility-based preference…
With the advancement of data-driven techniques, addressing continuous con-trol challenges has become more efficient. However, the reliance of these methods on historical data introduces the potential for unexpected decisions in novel…
In this paper, we implement three state-of-art continuous reinforcement learning algorithms, Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Policy Gradient (PG)in portfolio management. All of them are…
We derive the optimal differential privacy (DP) parameters of a mechanism that satisfies a given level of R\'enyi differential privacy (RDP). Our result is based on the joint range of two $f$-divergences that underlie the approximate and…
Deep learning models have been extensively adopted in various regions due to their ability to represent hierarchical features, which highly rely on the training set and procedures. Thus, protecting the training process and deep learning…
In this paper, we consider an infinite horizon average reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Distinguishing itself from existing works within this context, our approach harnesses the power of the general policy gradient-based algorithm,…
Modern machine learning algorithms aim to extract fine-grained information from data to provide accurate predictions, which often conflicts with the goal of privacy protection. This paper addresses the practical and theoretical importance…
Backdoor attacks on deep learning represent a recent threat that has gained significant attention in the research community. Backdoor defenses are mainly based on backdoor inversion, which has been shown to be generic, model-agnostic, and…
Policy gradient methods are appealing in deep reinforcement learning but suffer from high variance of gradient estimate. To reduce the variance, the state value function is applied commonly. However, the effect of the state value function…