Related papers: Regret-Aware Policy Optimization: Environment-Leve…
Large language models are commonly trained through multi-stage post-training: first via RLHF, then fine-tuned for other downstream objectives. Yet even small downstream updates can compromise earlier learned behaviors (e.g., safety),…
Policy-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) has established itself as the dominant paradigm in generative recommendation for optimizing sequential user interactions. However, when applied to offline historical logs, these methods suffer a…
In many real-world scenarios, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are trained on data with dynamics shift, i.e., with different underlying environment dynamics. A majority of current methods address such issue by training context…
Score-function based methods for policy learning, such as REINFORCE and PPO, have delivered strong results in game-playing and robotics, yet their high variance often undermines training stability. Using pathwise policy gradients, i.e.…
In environments with delayed observation, state augmentation by including actions within the delay window is adopted to retrieve Markovian property to enable reinforcement learning (RL). However, state-of-the-art (SOTA) RL techniques with…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find performant policies from logged data without further environment interaction. Model-based algorithms, which learn a model of the environment from the dataset and perform conservative policy…
Deploying Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents in the real-world require that the agents satisfy safety constraints. Current RL agents explore the environment without considering these constraints, which can lead to damage to the hardware or…
Solving tasks in Reinforcement Learning is no easy feat. As the goal of the agent is to maximize the accumulated reward, it often learns to exploit loopholes and misspecifications in the reward signal resulting in unwanted behavior. While…
Experience replay \citep{lin1993reinforcement, mnih2015human} is a widely used technique to achieve efficient use of data and improved performance in RL algorithms. In experience replay, past transitions are stored in a memory buffer and…
Offline reinforcement learning methods hold the promise of learning policies from pre-collected datasets without the need to query the environment for new transitions. This setting is particularly well-suited for continuous control robotic…
This dissertation investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) methods can be designed to be safe, sample-efficient, and robust. Framed through the unifying perspective of contextual-bandit RL, the work addresses two major application…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in sequential decision tasks. However, recent studies have revealed the vulnerability of RL policies to different perturbations, raising concerns about their effectiveness and…
In many domains of empirical sciences, discovering the causal structure within variables remains an indispensable task. Recently, to tackle with unoriented edges or latent assumptions violation suffered by conventional methods, researchers…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is challenged by the distributional shift between learning policies and datasets. To address this problem, existing works mainly focus on designing sophisticated algorithms to explicitly or implicitly…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown exceptional performance across various applications, enabling autonomous agents to learn optimal policies through interaction with their environments. However, traditional RL frameworks often face…
In batch reinforcement learning (RL), one often constrains a learned policy to be close to the behavior (data-generating) policy, e.g., by constraining the learned action distribution to differ from the behavior policy by some maximum…
Legged locomotion in unstructured environments demands not only high-performance control policies but also formal guarantees to ensure robustness under perturbations. Control methods often require carefully designed reference trajectories,…
While current emotional support dialogue systems typically rely on expert-defined scalar rewards for alignment, these signals suffer from severe information sparsity. They cannot explain why a response failed or how to adapt to dynamic user…
Visual model-based RL methods typically encode image observations into low-dimensional representations in a manner that does not eliminate redundant information. This leaves them susceptible to spurious variations -- changes in…
Adversarial optimization algorithms that explicitly search for flaws in agents' policies have been successfully applied to finding robust and diverse policies in multi-agent settings. However, the success of adversarial optimization has…