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Shenao Zhang

12 accepted papers

2026

Beyond Markovian: Reflective Exploration via Bayes-Adaptive RL for LLM Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) have exhibited strong reasoning capabilities and emergent reflective behaviors, such as rethinking and error correction, as a form of in-context exploration. However, the Markovian policy obtained from conventional RL training does…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Learning to Reason as Action Abstractions with Scalable Mid-Training RL

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models excel with reinforcement learning (RL), but fully unlocking this potential requires a mid-training stage. Intuitively, an effective mid-training stage should both learn a strong policy prior and enable fast learning through online interactions. We formalize this intuition by pr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

BRiTE: Bootstrapping Reinforced Thinking Process to Enhance Language Model Reasoning

ICML 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks, yet generating reliable reasoning processes remains a significant challenge. We present a unified probabilistic framework that formalizes LLM reasoning through a novel graphical model incorporating lat…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Offline Reinforcement Learning for LLM Multi-step Reasoning

ACL 2025finding

Improving the multi-step reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) with offline reinforcement learning (RL) is essential for quickly adapting them to complex tasks. While Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has shown promise in aligning LLMs with human preferences, it is less suitable for m…

2025

Reward-Augmented Data Enhances Direct Preference Alignment of LLMs

ICML 2025poster

Preference alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly improved their ability to adhere to human instructions and intentions. However, existing direct alignment algorithms primarily focus on relative preferences and often overlook the qualitative aspects of responses, despite having…

2024

Adaptive-Gradient Policy Optimization: Enhancing Policy Learning in Non-Smooth Differentiable Simulations

ICML 2024poster

Recent advancements in differentiable simulators highlight the potential of policy optimization using simulation gradients. Yet, these approaches are largely contingent on the continuity and smoothness of the simulation, which precludes the use of certain simulation engines, such as Mujoco. To tackl…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Provably Mitigating Overoptimization in RLHF: Your SFT Loss is Implicitly an Adversarial Regularizer

NeurIPS 2024poster

Aligning generative models with human preference via RLHF typically suffers from overoptimization, where an imperfectly learned reward model can misguide the generative model to output even undesired responses. We investigate this problem in a principled manner by identifying the source of the issue…

Cited by 49SourcePDFScholar
2024

Reason for Future, Act for Now: A Principled Architecture for Autonomous LLM Agents

ICML 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive reasoning abilities, but translating reasoning into actions in the real world remains challenging. In particular, it is unclear how to complete a given task provably within a minimum number of interactions with the external environment, e.g., throu…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

Adaptive Barrier Smoothing for First-Order Policy Gradient with Contact Dynamics

ICML 2023poster

Differentiable physics-based simulators have witnessed remarkable success in robot learning involving contact dynamics, benefiting from their improved accuracy and efficiency in solving the underlying complementarity problem. However, when utilizing the First-Order Policy Gradient (FOPG) method, our…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2023

Maximize to Explore: One Objective Function Fusing Estimation, Planning, and Exploration

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

In reinforcement learning (RL), balancing exploration and exploitation is crucial for achieving an optimal policy in a sample-efficient way. To this end, existing sample- efficient algorithms typically consist of three components: estimation, planning, and exploration. However, to cope with general…

2023

Model-Based Reparameterization Policy Gradient Methods: Theory and Practical Algorithms

NeurIPS 2023poster

ReParameterization (RP) Policy Gradient Methods (PGMs) have been widely adopted for continuous control tasks in robotics and computer graphics. However, recent studies have revealed that, when applied to long-term reinforcement learning problems, model-based RP PGMs may experience chaotic and non-sm…