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Wenhao Zhan

11 accepted papers

2025

Accelerating RL for LLM Reasoning with Optimal Advantage Regression

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to improve complex reasoning abilities. However, state-of-the-art policy optimization methods often suffer from high computational overhead and memory consumption, primarily due to the need for mu…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Correcting the Mythos of KL-Regularization: Direct Alignment without Overoptimization via Chi-Squared Preference Optimization

ICLR 2025spotlight

Language model alignment methods such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) have led to impressive advances in language model capabilities, but are limited by a widely observed phenomenon known as *overoptimization*, where the quality of the language model degrades over the course of…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2025

Exploiting Structure in Offline Multi-Agent RL: The Benefits of Low Interaction Rank

ICLR 2025poster

We study the problem of learning an approximate equilibrium in the offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) setting. We introduce a structural assumption---the interaction rank---and establish that functions with low interaction rank are significantly more robust to distribution shift compa…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Regressing the Relative Future: Efficient Policy Optimization for Multi-turn RLHF

ICLR 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success at tasks like summarization that involve a single turn of interaction. However, they can still struggle with multi-turn tasks like dialogue that require long-term planning. Previous works on multi-turn dialogue extend single-turn reinforc…

2024

Provable Offline Preference-Based Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2024spotlight

In this paper, we investigate the problem of offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) with human feedback where feedback is available in the form of preference between trajectory pairs rather than explicit rewards. Our proposed algorithm consists of two main steps: (1) estimate the imp…

Cited by 41SourcePDFScholar
2024

Provable Reward-Agnostic Preference-Based Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2024spotlight

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) is a paradigm in which an RL agent learns to optimize a task using pair-wise preference-based feedback over trajectories, rather than explicit reward signals. While PbRL has demonstrated practical success in fine-tuning language models, existing theoret…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2024

Provably Efficient CVaR RL in Low-rank MDPs

ICLR 2024poster

We study risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL), where we aim to maximize the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with a fixed risk tolerance $\tau$. Prior theoretical work studying risk-sensitive RL focuses on the tabular Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) setting. To extend CVaR RL to settings w…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

REBEL: Reinforcement Learning via Regressing Relative Rewards

NeurIPS 2024poster

While originally developed for continuous control problems, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has emerged as the work-horse of a variety of reinforcement learning (RL) applications, including the fine-tuning of generative models. Unfortunately, PPO requires multiple heuristics to enable stable conv…

2023

Decentralized Optimistic Hyperpolicy Mirror Descent: Provably No-Regret Learning in Markov Games

ICLR 2023poster

We study decentralized policy learning in Markov games where we control a single agent to play with nonstationary and possibly adversarial opponents. Our goal is to develop a no-regret online learning algorithm that (i) takes actions based on the local information observed by the agent and (ii) is a…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2023

PAC Reinforcement Learning for Predictive State Representations

ICLR 2023poster

In this paper we study online Reinforcement Learning (RL) in partially observable dynamical systems. We focus on the Predictive State Representations (PSRs) model, which is an expressive model that captures other well-known models such as Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP). PSR r…

Cited by 51SourcePDFScholar
2023

Reward-agnostic Fine-tuning: Provable Statistical Benefits of Hybrid Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

This paper studies tabular reinforcement learning (RL) in the hybrid setting, which assumes access to both an offline dataset and online interactions with the unknown environment. A central question boils down to how to efficiently utilize online data to strengthen and complement the offline dataset…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar