Related papers: Trust the Batch, On- or Off-Policy: Adaptive Polic…
In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy.…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods rely on experience replay to approximate the minibatched supervised learning setting; however, unlike supervised learning where access to lots of training data is crucial to generalization,…
Offline policy learning is aimed at learning decision-making policies using existing datasets of trajectories without collecting additional data. The primary motivation for using reinforcement learning (RL) instead of supervised learning…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…
Improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning algorithms requires effective exploration. Following the principle of $\textit{optimism in the face of uncertainty}$ (OFU), we train a separate exploration policy to maximize the…
Traditional on-policy Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) frameworks suffer from experience waste and reward homogeneity, which directly hinders learning efficiency on difficult samples during large language models…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs). Off-policy methods offer greater implementation simplicity and data efficiency than on-policy techniques, but often result in suboptimal performance. In…
Oftentimes, environments for sequential decision-making problems can be quite sparse in the provision of evaluative feedback to guide reinforcement-learning agents. In the extreme case, long trajectories of behavior are merely punctuated…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key post-pretraining step for aligning large language models (LLMs) with complex tasks and human preferences. While it is often assumed that RL fine-tuning requires updating most of a model's parameters, we…
Meta-reinforcement learning algorithms provide a data-driven way to acquire policies that quickly adapt to many tasks with varying rewards or dynamics functions. However, learned meta-policies are often effective only on the exact task…
In this work, we address the problem of determining reliable policies in reinforcement learning (RL), with a focus on optimization under uncertainty and the need for performance guarantees. While classical RL algorithms aim at maximizing…
Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are two prominent post-training paradigms for refining the capabilities and aligning the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing approaches that integrate SFT and RL…
In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we seek to utilize offline data to evaluate (or learn) policies in scenarios where the data are collected from a distribution that substantially differs from that of the target policy to be evaluated.…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn an effective policy from a static dataset. To alleviate extrapolation errors, existing studies often uniformly regularize the value function or policy updates across all states. However, due…
Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models can be viewed as an off-policy learning problem, where expert demonstrations come from a fixed behavior policy while training aims to optimize a target policy. Importance sampling is the…
This paper prescribes a suite of techniques for off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) that simplify the training process and reduce the sample complexity. First, we show that simple Deterministic Policy Gradient works remarkably well as…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is notoriously data-inefficient, which makes training on a real robot difficult. While model-based RL algorithms (world models) improve data-efficiency to some extent, they still require hours or days of…
Most deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems are not able to learn effectively from off-policy data, especially if they cannot explore online in the environment. These are critical shortcomings for applying RL to real-world problems where…
Many applications in Reinforcement Learning (RL) usually have noise or stochasticity present in the environment. Beyond their impact on learning, these uncertainties lead the exact same policy to perform differently, i.e. yield different…