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Yiding Chen

13 accepted papers

2026

Value-as-Return: A Two-Stage Framework to Align on the Optimal Score Function

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement learning with diffusion models has shown strong potential, but existing approaches such as variants of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) often rely on an inaccurate simplification: they equate trajectory likelihoods with final-state probabilities. This mismatch leads to suboptimal a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

A Cramér–von Mises Approach to Incentivizing Truthful Data Sharing

NeurIPS 2025poster

Modern data marketplaces and data sharing consortia increasingly rely on incentive mechanisms to encourage agents to contribute data. However, schemes that reward agents based on the quantity of submitted data are vulnerable to manipulation, as agents may submit fabricated or low-quality data to inf…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Avoiding exp(R) scaling in RLHF through Preference-based Exploration

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a pivotal technique for large language model (LLM) alignment. This paper studies the setting of online RLHF and focuses on improving its sample efficiency. All existing algorithms for online RLHF, whether doing passive exploration or a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Collaborative Mean Estimation Among Heterogeneous Strategic Agents: Individual Rationality, Fairness, and Truthful Contribution

ICML 2025poster

We study a collaborative learning problem where $m$ agents aim to estimate a vector $\mu =(\mu_1,\ldots,\mu_d)\in \mathbb{R}^d$ by sampling from associated univariate normal distributions $(\mathcal{N}(\mu_k, \sigma^2))\_{k\in[d]}$. Agent $i$ incurs a cost $c_{i,k}$ to sample from $\mathcal{N}(\mu_k…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Convergence of Consistency Model with Multistep Sampling under General Data Assumptions

ICML 2025poster

Diffusion models accomplish remarkable success in data generation tasks across various domains. However, the iterative sampling process is computationally expensive. Consistency models are proposed to learn consistency functions to map from noise to data directly, which allows one-step fast data gen…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Diffusing States and Matching Scores: A New Framework for Imitation Learning

ICLR 2025poster

Adversarial Imitation Learning is traditionally framed as a two-player zero-sum game between a learner and an adversarially chosen cost function, and can therefore be thought of as the sequential generalization of a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). However, in recent years, diffusion models hav…

2025

Scaling Offline RL via Efficient and Expressive Shortcut Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Diffusion and flow models have emerged as powerful generative approaches capable of modeling diverse and multimodal behavior. However, applying these models to offline RL remains challenging due to the iterative nature of their noise sampling processes, making policy optimization difficult. In this…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Exact Policy Recovery in Offline RL with Both Heavy-Tailed Rewards and Data Corruption

AAAI 2024technical

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) with heavy-tailed reward distribution and data corruption: (i) Moving beyond subGaussian reward distribution, we allow the rewards to have infinite variances; (ii) We allow corruptions where an attacker can arbitrarily modify a small fraction of the rewar…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Minimally Modifying a Markov Game to Achieve Any Nash Equilibrium and Value

ICML 2024poster

We study the game modification problem, where a benevolent game designer or a malevolent adversary modifies the reward function of a zero-sum Markov game so that a target deterministic or stochastic policy profile becomes the unique Markov perfect Nash equilibrium and has a value within a target ran…

2023

Byzantine-Robust Online and Offline Distributed Reinforcement Learning

AISTATS 2023poster

We consider a distributed reinforcement learning setting where multiple agents separately explore the environment and communicate their experiences through a central server. However, $\alpha$-fraction of agents are adversarial and can report arbitrary fake information. Critically, these adversarial…

Cited by 23SourcePDFScholar
2021

Robust Policy Gradient against Strong Data Corruption

ICML 2021spotlight

We study the problem of robust reinforcement learning under adversarial corruption on both rewards and transitions. Our attack model assumes an \textit{adaptive} adversary who can arbitrarily corrupt the reward and transition at every step within an episode, for at most $\epsilon$-fraction of the le…