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Open problems in Learning verifiable rewards

Poor credit assignment in diffusion model RL1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Limits efficiency and stability when fine-tuning diffusion models with black-box rewards.
- DiffusionART: Efficient, Stable and Scalable Reinforcement of Diffusion Modelsraises · addresses
Vanishing group-relative reward signals1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
All rollouts receiving the same reward lose useful trajectory-level information for learning.
- Self-Retrospection Distillation: Turning Post-hoc Experiences into Prior Foresightraises · addresses
Memory inefficiency in LLM RL post-training1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
High memory demands prevent scaling RL to larger models or longer training runs.
- LoGRA: Scaling LLM Reinforcement Learning with Low-Rank Gradient Sketchesraises · addresses
Sparse terminal rewards degrade value tracking1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Standard critics fail to model value evolution along trajectories, harming credit assignment.
- TPPO: Tracking-Value PPO For Language Model Reasoningraises · addresses
Reward hacking in rubric-based RL1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Additive reward aggregation allows policies to exploit criteria compensation, reducing task appropriateness.
- Scoring Higher, Answering Worse: Mitigating Reward Hacking in Rubric-Based RL via Protocol-Level Rubricsraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

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learning verifiable rewards · reinforcement learning rl · reinforcement learning verifiable321 papers54 this week
optimal regret · near optimal · bandits212 papers31 this week
offline reinforcement learning · offline reinforcement · reinforcement learning rl174 papers28 this week
reinforcement learning rl · reinforcement learning · markov decision processes103 papers15 this week
policy gradient · reinforcement learning rl · reinforcement learning verifiable91 papers15 this week

Topics in this field

Active contributors · 90 days

Active contributors

Activity · 12 weeks

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All papers in Research

arXiv cs.CEOct 7
Strategic Investment Decision Making for Value Creation in Energy Transition: A Reinforcement Learning Approach
Yasaman Cheraghi, Reidar B. Bratvold, Aojie Hong, Ressi B. Muhammad, Sergey Alyaev
The global challenge of climate change has driven significant steps to reduce CO2 emissions, guided by international agreements like the Paris Agreement of 2015. Acting too slowly could result in future losses and reputational damage, while moving too quickly could jeopardize shareholder value due to the marginal profitability or potential losses due to technology immaturity of many renewable projects. To navigate this complex transition, energy companies must adopt Sequential Decision Making (SDM) strategies to maximize value creation from decision flexibility under uncertainties. To support this, we developed a custom simulation environment to model the dynamic energy landscape up to 2050. Building on this, we designed a multi-criteria SDM framework that explores various decision strategies related to different portfolios for allocating funds across three sectors: oil & gas, renewables, and CO2 reduction. It aims to maximize value during the transition while accounting for uncertainties in productions, energy prices, and costs. This framework has three objectives: maximizing profit, minimizing CO2 social costs, and enhancing competitive advantage in the renewable energy sector.…
PDF arXiv
arXiv stat.MLOct 7
Best Arm Identification for Bandits with Shifting Means
Lukas Zierahn, Wouter M. Koolen, Shubhada Agrawal, Christina Katsimerou, Dirk van der Hoeven
We study the best arm identification problem in a stochastic environment with a novel form of adversarial perturbations, which we coin Shifting Means. While classically the mean rewards of the $K$ arms are stable in time, in Shifting Means only the gaps $\boldsymbolΔ$ between mean rewards are stable, while their common shift may be determined adversarially in each round. The objective of the learner is to identify the best arm with high probability while minimizing sample complexity (the fixed confidence setting). Handling shifts requires new tools: we show that algorithms employing a Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT) stopping rule, including the popular Track-and-Stop, fail under time-varying shifts. Instead, we propose Importance Weights for Shifting Means ($\mathsf{ISM}$). Assuming means bounded by $U$ and $σ^2$-sub-Gaussian rewards, we show $\mathsf{ISM}$ to be $δ$-correct and to enjoy a sample complexity bound of order $K (σ^2 + U^2) Δ_{\min}^{-2} \ln \frac{1}δ$. We also present a matching (up to constant factors) worst-case lower bound and evaluate our results empirically.
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.LGCodeOct 7▲ 25
Q-Learning with Scalar Adjoint Matching
Yonghoon Dong, Minsung Yoon, Jaehyuk Kim, Jungwoo Park, Changyeon Kim +1
Flow policies capture rich and diverse action distributions, and fine-tuning them with off-policy RL to improve beyond the demonstrations has drawn growing interest. However, fine-tuning a flow policy against a learned value function is not trivial, because the policy generates its action over many flow steps. Adjoint matching offers a principled way to update the flow model itself by propagating value information from the final action back to each flow step, but it requires a vector--Jacobian product through the policy at every step, a cost that grows with the number of flow steps and the policy size. We observe that the batch-averaged velocity Jacobian of pretrained flow policies concentrates on its diagonal. Motivated by this finding, we derive a closed-form scalar adjoint that scales the value gradient at the final action by the flow time, eliminating the per-step vector--Jacobian products. We further find that controlling the critic's value at policy-generated actions is particularly important under the scalar adjoint. Based on these findings, we propose Q-learning with Scalar Adjoint Matching (SQAM), which combines the scalar adjoint with a value penalty at those actions.…
PDF arXiv Code
arXiv cs.LGOct 7
Which Rollout Taught It That? BehaviorTrace and the Limits of Training-Data Attribution in Online RL
Amit Nautiyal
When reinforcement learning teaches a language model a new behavior, can we find the training rollouts that taught it? And when an attribution method says it can, how do we know the answer is real? We study both questions on online RL fine-tuning with GRPO, using a planted behavior with a known cause. We release BehaviorTrace, an open evaluation harness that combines full-gradient sketching, the planted-behavior setup, and controls for gradient magnitude, fluency, headroom, and variation across seeds and generation draws. Across three seeds on Qwen2.5-1.5B, much of the apparent attribution signal comes from confounds. A control that ranks training steps by gradient size alone, with no behavior target, reaches 4.2 to 4.5 times chance and matches or beats the best targeted estimator on two of three seeds. At saturated checkpoints, model fluency predicts the behavior label at least as well as every gradient method we compared it with. Once fluency is controlled, the per-rollout results change from seed to seed and from one generation draw to the next, so a single run cannot settle the question. One signal does hold on all three seeds. The gradient of the trigger tokens aligns with a…
PDF arXiv
arXiv stat.MLOct 7
Safe Meta-Policy Design with Risk Control
Wenbin Zhou, Michael Lingzhi Li, Shixiang Zhu
Models can be retrained as new data arrive, but deploying every new version risks replacing a good policy with a worse one. We study how to plan policy updates (i.e., meta-policy) before future candidates are trained, balancing the benefits of improvement against the risk of performance regression. Our offline meta-policy maximizes expected cumulative value subject to a budget on the expected number of updates that perform worse than the policies they replace. We estimate the value and risk of possible switches from historical learning trajectories, represent an update schedule as a path in a directed acyclic graph, and select a schedule using dynamic programming. A leading-order analysis identifies the signal-to-noise ratio of policy improvement as a key driver of update frequency, waiting times, and risk allocation: clearer improvements support earlier, more frequent updates, while noisier improvements call for longer waits or greater risk expenditure. Their asymptotic rates also reveal a diminishing marginal cost of achieving greater safety over time. Experiments on synthetic and clinical trial data illustrate the performance--risk tradeoff and compare our method with…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.ITOct 7
Pathwise Information Certificates for Decentralized Adaptive Sensing
Theodoros Tsiligkaridis
We study decentralized adaptive sensing, where multiple agents choose measurements from evolving local beliefs while exchanging information over a communication graph. We ask whether the measurements actually selected by an adaptive policy have collected enough evidence to distinguish the true target from every plausible alternative. We develop a pathwise certificate based on the Rényi--Chernoff information accumulated along the realized sensing trajectory. It yields nonasymptotic MAP-error bounds and an anytime, network-wide stopping rule for arbitrary history-dependent sensing policies, while separating accumulated statistical information from a bounded network-mixing transient. Linear growth of the information against the least-resolved competitor implies exponential decay of MAP and squared-localization error. A classical pairwise KL converse, specialized to the adaptive decentralized transcript, shows that insufficient information on any pair prevents a positive uniform error exponent, confirming the hardest competitor as a fundamental bottleneck. Across policies, graph topologies, sensor profiles, and seeds, the worst-competitor score correlates more strongly with…
PDF arXiv

Papers

Topics in this field

learning verifiable rewards · reinforcement learning rl · reinforcement learning verifiable321 papers54 this week
optimal regret · near optimal · bandits212 papers31 this week
offline reinforcement learning · offline reinforcement · reinforcement learning rl174 papers28 this week
reinforcement learning rl · reinforcement learning · markov decision processes103 papers15 this week
policy gradient · reinforcement learning rl · reinforcement learning verifiable91 papers15 this week

Active contributors · 90 days

Recent papers

All papers in Research

arXiv cs.CEOct 7
Strategic Investment Decision Making for Value Creation in Energy Transition: A Reinforcement Learning Approach
Yasaman Cheraghi, Reidar B. Bratvold, Aojie Hong, Ressi B. Muhammad, Sergey Alyaev
The global challenge of climate change has driven significant steps to reduce CO2 emissions, guided by international agreements like the Paris Agreement of 2015. Acting too slowly could result in future losses and reputational damage, while moving too quickly could jeopardize shareholder value due to the marginal profitability or potential losses due to technology immaturity of many renewable projects. To navigate this complex transition, energy companies must adopt Sequential Decision Making (SDM) strategies to maximize value creation from decision flexibility under uncertainties. To support this, we developed a custom simulation environment to model the dynamic energy landscape up to 2050. Building on this, we designed a multi-criteria SDM framework that explores various decision strategies related to different portfolios for allocating funds across three sectors: oil & gas, renewables, and CO2 reduction. It aims to maximize value during the transition while accounting for uncertainties in productions, energy prices, and costs. This framework has three objectives: maximizing profit, minimizing CO2 social costs, and enhancing competitive advantage in the renewable energy sector.…
PDF arXiv
arXiv stat.MLOct 7
Best Arm Identification for Bandits with Shifting Means
Lukas Zierahn, Wouter M. Koolen, Shubhada Agrawal, Christina Katsimerou, Dirk van der Hoeven
We study the best arm identification problem in a stochastic environment with a novel form of adversarial perturbations, which we coin Shifting Means. While classically the mean rewards of the $K$ arms are stable in time, in Shifting Means only the gaps $\boldsymbolΔ$ between mean rewards are stable, while their common shift may be determined adversarially in each round. The objective of the learner is to identify the best arm with high probability while minimizing sample complexity (the fixed confidence setting). Handling shifts requires new tools: we show that algorithms employing a Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT) stopping rule, including the popular Track-and-Stop, fail under time-varying shifts. Instead, we propose Importance Weights for Shifting Means ($\mathsf{ISM}$). Assuming means bounded by $U$ and $σ^2$-sub-Gaussian rewards, we show $\mathsf{ISM}$ to be $δ$-correct and to enjoy a sample complexity bound of order $K (σ^2 + U^2) Δ_{\min}^{-2} \ln \frac{1}δ$. We also present a matching (up to constant factors) worst-case lower bound and evaluate our results empirically.
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.LGCodeOct 7▲ 25
Q-Learning with Scalar Adjoint Matching
Yonghoon Dong, Minsung Yoon, Jaehyuk Kim, Jungwoo Park, Changyeon Kim +1
Flow policies capture rich and diverse action distributions, and fine-tuning them with off-policy RL to improve beyond the demonstrations has drawn growing interest. However, fine-tuning a flow policy against a learned value function is not trivial, because the policy generates its action over many flow steps. Adjoint matching offers a principled way to update the flow model itself by propagating value information from the final action back to each flow step, but it requires a vector--Jacobian product through the policy at every step, a cost that grows with the number of flow steps and the policy size. We observe that the batch-averaged velocity Jacobian of pretrained flow policies concentrates on its diagonal. Motivated by this finding, we derive a closed-form scalar adjoint that scales the value gradient at the final action by the flow time, eliminating the per-step vector--Jacobian products. We further find that controlling the critic's value at policy-generated actions is particularly important under the scalar adjoint. Based on these findings, we propose Q-learning with Scalar Adjoint Matching (SQAM), which combines the scalar adjoint with a value penalty at those actions.…
PDF arXiv Code
arXiv cs.LGOct 7
Which Rollout Taught It That? BehaviorTrace and the Limits of Training-Data Attribution in Online RL
Amit Nautiyal
When reinforcement learning teaches a language model a new behavior, can we find the training rollouts that taught it? And when an attribution method says it can, how do we know the answer is real? We study both questions on online RL fine-tuning with GRPO, using a planted behavior with a known cause. We release BehaviorTrace, an open evaluation harness that combines full-gradient sketching, the planted-behavior setup, and controls for gradient magnitude, fluency, headroom, and variation across seeds and generation draws. Across three seeds on Qwen2.5-1.5B, much of the apparent attribution signal comes from confounds. A control that ranks training steps by gradient size alone, with no behavior target, reaches 4.2 to 4.5 times chance and matches or beats the best targeted estimator on two of three seeds. At saturated checkpoints, model fluency predicts the behavior label at least as well as every gradient method we compared it with. Once fluency is controlled, the per-rollout results change from seed to seed and from one generation draw to the next, so a single run cannot settle the question. One signal does hold on all three seeds. The gradient of the trigger tokens aligns with a…
PDF arXiv
arXiv stat.MLOct 7
Safe Meta-Policy Design with Risk Control
Wenbin Zhou, Michael Lingzhi Li, Shixiang Zhu
Models can be retrained as new data arrive, but deploying every new version risks replacing a good policy with a worse one. We study how to plan policy updates (i.e., meta-policy) before future candidates are trained, balancing the benefits of improvement against the risk of performance regression. Our offline meta-policy maximizes expected cumulative value subject to a budget on the expected number of updates that perform worse than the policies they replace. We estimate the value and risk of possible switches from historical learning trajectories, represent an update schedule as a path in a directed acyclic graph, and select a schedule using dynamic programming. A leading-order analysis identifies the signal-to-noise ratio of policy improvement as a key driver of update frequency, waiting times, and risk allocation: clearer improvements support earlier, more frequent updates, while noisier improvements call for longer waits or greater risk expenditure. Their asymptotic rates also reveal a diminishing marginal cost of achieving greater safety over time. Experiments on synthetic and clinical trial data illustrate the performance--risk tradeoff and compare our method with…
PDF arXiv
arXiv cs.ITOct 7
Pathwise Information Certificates for Decentralized Adaptive Sensing
Theodoros Tsiligkaridis
We study decentralized adaptive sensing, where multiple agents choose measurements from evolving local beliefs while exchanging information over a communication graph. We ask whether the measurements actually selected by an adaptive policy have collected enough evidence to distinguish the true target from every plausible alternative. We develop a pathwise certificate based on the Rényi--Chernoff information accumulated along the realized sensing trajectory. It yields nonasymptotic MAP-error bounds and an anytime, network-wide stopping rule for arbitrary history-dependent sensing policies, while separating accumulated statistical information from a bounded network-mixing transient. Linear growth of the information against the least-resolved competitor implies exponential decay of MAP and squared-localization error. A classical pairwise KL converse, specialized to the adaptive decentralized transcript, shows that insufficient information on any pair prevents a positive uniform error exponent, confirming the hardest competitor as a fundamental bottleneck. Across policies, graph topologies, sensor profiles, and seeds, the worst-competitor score correlates more strongly with…
PDF arXiv

Activity · 12 weeks

Fields · AI · updated 30m ago

Learning verifiable rewards

Found by the topic model: learning verifiable rewards, optimal regret, offline reinforcement learning.

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Open problems in Learning verifiable rewards

Poor credit assignment in diffusion model RL1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Limits efficiency and stability when fine-tuning diffusion models with black-box rewards.
- DiffusionART: Efficient, Stable and Scalable Reinforcement of Diffusion Modelsraises · addresses
Vanishing group-relative reward signals1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
All rollouts receiving the same reward lose useful trajectory-level information for learning.
- Self-Retrospection Distillation: Turning Post-hoc Experiences into Prior Foresightraises · addresses
Memory inefficiency in LLM RL post-training1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
High memory demands prevent scaling RL to larger models or longer training runs.
- LoGRA: Scaling LLM Reinforcement Learning with Low-Rank Gradient Sketchesraises · addresses
Sparse terminal rewards degrade value tracking1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Standard critics fail to model value evolution along trajectories, harming credit assignment.
- TPPO: Tracking-Value PPO For Language Model Reasoningraises · addresses
Reward hacking in rubric-based RL1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Additive reward aggregation allows policies to exploit criteria compensation, reducing task appropriateness.
- Scoring Higher, Answering Worse: Mitigating Reward Hacking in Rubric-Based RL via Protocol-Level Rubricsraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.