13 accepted papers
LLM inference often generates a batch of candidates for a prompt and selects one via strategies like majority voting or Best-of- N (BoN). For difficult tasks, this single-shot selection often underperforms. Consequently, evaluations commonly report Pass@$k$: the agent may submit up to $k$ responses,…
Recent years have witnessed increasing interests in tackling heteroscedastic noise in bandits and reinforcement learning \citep{zhou2021nearly, zhao2023variance, jia2024does, pacchiano2025second}. In these works, the cumulative variance of the noise $\Lambda = \sum_{t=1}^T \sigma_t^2$, where $\sigma…
Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning with KL-regularized objectives can enjoy *faster* rates of convergence or *logarithmic* regret, in contrast to the classical $\sqrt{T}$-type regret in the unregularized setting. However, the statistical efficiency of online learning with respect …
Many offline reinforcement learning algorithms are underpinned by $f$-divergence regularization, but their sample complexity *defined with respect to regularized objectives* still lacks tight analyses, especially in terms of concrete data coverage conditions. In this paper, we study the exact concen…
Imitation learning is a central problem in reinforcement learning where the goal is to learn a policy that mimics the expert's behavior. In practice, it is often challenging to learn the expert policy from a limited number of demonstrations accurately due to the complexity of the state space. Moreov…
Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) have shown that KL-regularization plays a pivotal role in improving the efficiency of RL fine-tuning for large language models (LLMs). Despite its empirical advantage, the theoretical difference between KL-regularized RL and standa…
Reverse-Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization has emerged to be a predominant technique to enhance policy optimization in reinforcement learning (RL) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which forces the learned policy to stay close to a reference policy. While the effectiveness of…
The exploration-exploitation dilemma has been a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) with complex model classes. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, Monotonic Q-Learning with Upper Confidence Bound (MQL-UCB) for RL with general function approximation. Our key algorithmic design i…
Contextual dueling bandits, where a learner compares two options based on context and receives feedback indicating which was preferred, extends classic dueling bandits by incorporating contextual information for decision-making and preference learning. Several algorithms based on the upper confidenc…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL), where the agent aims to learn the optimal policy based on the data collected by a behavior policy, has attracted increasing attention in recent years. While offline RL with linear function approximation has been extensively studied with optimal results achieved u…
Dueling bandits is a prominent framework for decision-making involving preferential feedback, a valuable feature that fits various applications involving human interaction, such as ranking, information retrieval, and recommendation systems. While substantial efforts have been made to minimize the cu…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation. For episodic time-inhomogeneous linear Markov decision processes (linear MDPs) whose transition probability can be parameterized as a linear function of a given feature mapping, we propose the first computationally efficient al…
We study the problem of online generalized linear regression in the stochastic setting, where the label is generated from a generalized linear model with possibly unbounded additive noise. We provide a sharp analysis of the classical *follow-the-regularized-leader* (FTRL) algorithm to cope with the…