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Trajectory Data Suffices for Statistically Efficient Learning in Offline RL with Linear q-pi Realizability and Concentrability

Neural Information Processing Systems

The hope in this setting is that learning a good policy will be possible without requiring a sample size that scales with the number of states in the MDP . Foster et al. [ 2021 ] have shown this to be impossible even under concentrability, a data coverage assumption where a coefficient C




Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training

Zhuang, Yuchen, Yang, Jingfeng, Jiang, Haoming, Liu, Xin, Cheng, Kewei, Lokegaonkar, Sanket, Gao, Yifan, Ping, Qing, Liu, Tianyi, Huang, Binxuan, Li, Zheng, Wang, Zhengyang, Chen, Pei, Wang, Ruijie, Zhang, Rongzhi, Zalmout, Nasser, Nigam, Priyanka, Yin, Bing, Zhang, Chao

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Due to the scarcity of agent-oriented pre-training data, LLM-based autonomous agents typically rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning, which often fails to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability. We introduce Hephaestus-Forge, the first large-scale pre-training corpus designed to enhance the fundamental capabilities of LLM agents in API function calling, intrinsic reasoning and planning, and adapting to environmental feedback. Hephaestus-Forge comprises 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs, including both tool documentation to introduce knowledge of API functions and function calling trajectories to strengthen intrinsic reasoning. To explore effective training protocols, we investigate scaling laws to identify the optimal recipe in data mixing ratios. By continual pre-training on Hephaestus-Forge, Hephaestus outperforms small- to medium-scale open-source LLMs and rivals commercial LLMs on three agent benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our pre-training corpus in enhancing fundamental agentic capabilities and generalization of LLMs to new tasks or environments.


Inverse Delayed Reinforcement Learning

Zhan, Simon Sinong, Wu, Qingyuan, Ruan, Zhian, Yang, Frank, Wang, Philip, Wang, Yixuan, Jiao, Ruochen, Huang, Chao, Zhu, Qi

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) has demonstrated effectiveness in a variety of imitation tasks. In this paper, we introduce an IRL framework designed to extract rewarding features from expert trajectories affected by delayed disturbances. Instead of relying on direct observations, our approach employs an efficient off-policy adversarial training framework to derive expert features and recover optimal policies from augmented delayed observations. Empirical evaluations in the MuJoCo environment under diverse delay settings validate the effectiveness of our method. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical analysis showing that recovering expert policies from augmented delayed observations outperforms using direct delayed observations.


How more data can hurt: Instability and regularization in next-generation reservoir computing

Zhang, Yuanzhao, Cornelius, Sean P.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

It has been found recently that more data can, counter-intuitively, hurt the performance of deep neural networks. Here, we show that a more extreme version of the phenomenon occurs in data-driven models of dynamical systems. To elucidate the underlying mechanism, we focus on next-generation reservoir computing (NGRC) -- a popular framework for learning dynamics from data. We find that, despite learning a better representation of the flow map with more training data, NGRC can adopt an ill-conditioned ``integrator'' and lose stability. We link this data-induced instability to the auxiliary dimensions created by the delayed states in NGRC. Based on these findings, we propose simple strategies to mitigate the instability, either by increasing regularization strength in tandem with data size, or by carefully introducing noise during training. Our results highlight the importance of proper regularization in data-driven modeling of dynamical systems.


Trajectory Data Suffices for Statistically Efficient Learning in Offline RL with Linear $q^\pi$-Realizability and Concentrability

Tkachuk, Volodymyr, Weisz, Gellért, Szepesvári, Csaba

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We consider offline reinforcement learning (RL) in $H$-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the linear $q^\pi$-realizability assumption, where the action-value function of every policy is linear with respect to a given $d$-dimensional feature function. The hope in this setting is that learning a good policy will be possible without requiring a sample size that scales with the number of states in the MDP. Foster et al. [2021] have shown this to be impossible even under $\textit{concentrability}$, a data coverage assumption where a coefficient $C_\text{conc}$ bounds the extent to which the state-action distribution of any policy can veer off the data distribution. However, the data in this previous work was in the form of a sequence of individual transitions. This leaves open the question of whether the negative result mentioned could be overcome if the data was composed of sequences of full trajectories. In this work we answer this question positively by proving that with trajectory data, a dataset of size $\text{poly}(d,H,C_\text{conc})/\epsilon^2$ is sufficient for deriving an $\epsilon$-optimal policy, regardless of the size of the state space. The main tool that makes this result possible is due to Weisz et al. [2023], who demonstrate that linear MDPs can be used to approximate linearly $q^\pi$-realizable MDPs. The connection to trajectory data is that the linear MDP approximation relies on "skipping" over certain states. The associated estimation problems are thus easy when working with trajectory data, while they remain nontrivial when working with individual transitions. The question of computational efficiency under our assumptions remains open.