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Dipendra Misra

22 accepted papers

2025

Principled Fine-tuning of LLMs from User-Edits: A Medley of Preference, Supervision, and Reward

NeurIPS 2025poster

We study how to fine-tune LLMs using user-edit deployment data consisting of a set of context, an agent's response, and user edits. This deployment data is naturally generated by users in applications such as LLMs-based writing assistants and coding agents. The _natural_ origin of user edits makes i…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Aligning LLM Agents by Learning Latent Preference from User Edits

NeurIPS 2024poster

We study interactive learning of language agents based on user edits made to the agent's output. In a typical setting such as writing assistants, the user interacts with a language agent to generate a response given a context, and may optionally edit the agent response to personalize it based on the…

2024

Is Behavior Cloning All You Need? Understanding Horizon in Imitation Learning

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Imitation learning (IL) aims to mimic the behavior of an expert in a sequential decision making task by learning from demonstrations, and has been widely applied to robotics, autonomous driving, and autoregressive text generation. The simplest approach to IL, behavior cloning (BC) is thought to incu…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2024

Policy Improvement using Language Feedback Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

We introduce Language Feedback Models (LFMs) that identify desirable behaviour --- actions that help achieve tasks specified in the instruction - for imitation learning in instruction following. To train LFMs, we obtain feedback from Large Language Models (LLMs) on visual trajectories verbalized to…

2024

Provable Interactive Learning with Hindsight Instruction Feedback

ICML 2024poster

We study interactive learning in a setting where the agent has to generate a response (e.g., an action or trajectory) given a context and an instruction. In contrast, to typical approaches that train the system using reward or expert supervision on response, we study _learning with hindsight labelin…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

The Truth is in There: Improving Reasoning in Language Models with Layer-Selective Rank Reduction

ICLR 2024poster

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a fixture in modern machine learning. Correspondingly, significant resources are allocated towards research that aims to further advance this technology, typically resulting in models of increasing size that are trained on increasing amounts…

2024

Towards Principled Representation Learning from Videos for Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2024spotlight

We study pre-training representations for decision-making using video data, which is abundantly available for tasks such as game agents and software testing. Even though significant empirical advances have been made on this problem, a theoretical understanding remains absent. We initiate the theoret…

2023

Principled Offline RL in the Presence of Rich Exogenous Information

ICML 2023poster

Learning to control an agent from offline data collected in a rich pixel-based visual observation space is vital for real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL). A major challenge in this setting is the presence of input information that is hard to model and irrelevant to controlling the…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2023

Provable Safe Reinforcement Learning with Binary Feedback

AISTATS 2023poster

Safety is a crucial necessity in many applications of reinforcement learning (RL), whether robotic, automotive, or medical. Many existing approaches to safe RL rely on receiving numeric safety feedback, but in many cases this feedback can only take binary values; that is, whether an action in a give…

2023

Survival Instinct in Offline Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

We present a novel observation about the behavior of offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms: on many benchmark datasets, offline RL can produce well-performing and safe policies even when trained with "wrong" reward labels, such as those that are zero everywhere or are negatives of the true…

2022

Investigating the Role of Negatives in Contrastive Representation Learning

AISTATS 2022poster

Noise contrastive learning is a popular technique for unsupervised representation learning. In this approach, a representation is obtained via reduction to supervised learning, where given a notion of semantic similarity, the learner tries to distinguish a similar (positive) example from a collectio…

Cited by 60SourcePDFScholar
2022

Provably Filtering Exogenous Distractors using Multistep Inverse Dynamics

ICLR 2022oral

Many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) require the agent to deal with high-dimensional observations such as those generated from a megapixel camera. Prior work has addressed such problems with representation learning, through which the agent can provably extract endogenous, late…

Cited by 31SourcePDFScholar
2022

Provably sample-efficient RL with side information about latent dynamics

NeurIPS 2022accept

We study reinforcement learning (RL) in settings where observations are high-dimensional, but where an RL agent has access to abstract knowledge about the structure of the state space, as is the case, for example, when a robot is tasked to go to a specific room in a building using observations from…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2022

Understanding Contrastive Learning Requires Incorporating Inductive Biases

ICML 2022spotlight

Contrastive learning is a popular form of self-supervised learning that encourages augmentations (views) of the same input to have more similar representations compared to augmentations of different inputs. Recent attempts to theoretically explain the success of contrastive learning on downstream cl…

Cited by 141SourcePDFScholar
2021

Interactive Learning from Activity Description

ICML 2021spotlight

We present a novel interactive learning protocol that enables training request-fulfilling agents by verbally describing their activities. Unlike imitation learning (IL), our protocol allows the teaching agent to provide feedback in a language that is most appropriate for them. Compared with reward i…

2021

Provable Rich Observation Reinforcement Learning with Combinatorial Latent States

ICLR 2021poster

We propose a novel setting for reinforcement learning that combines two common real-world difficulties: presence of observations (such as camera images) and factored states (such as location of objects). In our setting, the agent receives observations generated stochastically from a "latent" factore…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2020

Kinematic State Abstraction and Provably Efficient Rich-Observation Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2020poster

We present an algorithm, HOMER, for exploration and reinforcement learning in rich observation environments that are summarizable by an unknown latent state space. The algorithm interleaves representation learning to identify a new notion of kinematic state abstraction with strategic exploration to…

Cited by 200SourcePDFScholar
2020

Learning the Linear Quadratic Regulator from Nonlinear Observations

NeurIPS 2020poster

We introduce a new problem setting for continuous control called the LQR with Rich Observations, or RichLQR. In our setting, the environment is summarized by a low-dimensional continuous latent state with linear dynamics and quadratic costs, but the agent operates on high-dimensional, nonlinear obse…

Cited by 48SourcePDFScholar
2019

EARLY FUSION for Goal Directed Robotic Vision

IROS 2019poster

Building perceptual systems for robotics which perform well under tight computational budgets requires novel architectures which rethink the traditional computer vision pipeline. Modern vision architectures require the agent to build a summary representation of the entire scene, even if most of the…

Cited by 10SourceScholar
2019

TOUCHDOWN: Natural Language Navigation and Spatial Reasoning in Visual Street Environments

CVPR 2019poster

We study the problem of jointly reasoning about language and vision through a navigation and spatial reasoning task. We introduce the Touchdown task and dataset, where an agent must first follow navigation instructions in a Street View environment to a goal position, and then guess a location in its…

Cited by 433PDFcodeScholar
2018

Mapping Navigation Instructions to Continuous Control Actions with Position-Visitation Prediction

CoRL 2018

We propose an approach for mapping natural language instructions and raw observations to continuous control of a quadcopter drone. Our model predicts interpretable position-visitation distributions indicating where the agent should go during execution and where it should stop, and uses the predicted