The paper proposes a method for allocating a limited budget of expert annotations to optimize the accuracy of off-policy evaluation in settings where rewards are missing or noisy. By deriving variance‑optimal annotation probabilities for sequential, forward‑monotone protocols, the authors provide a batch‑adaptive implementation that can be applied to real data. Experiments on casenotes from a homelessness services nonprofit and on human‑preference votes from LMArena demonstrate substantial reductions in RMSE—up to 65% for housing placement and 68% for progress toward a housing application—when using only 40% or more of the full annotation budget.
Offline reinforcement learning and off-policy evaluation evaluates dynamic treatment rules based on retrospectively collected data prior to deployment. In recent AI applications, state and reward info...
arXiv:2502. 10605v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Problem definition: Estimating causal effects of interventions is central to policy and operations, but outcome data are often missing or costly to obtain.
arXiv:2609.38860v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning from human preferences is central to large language model (LLM) alignment, but human preference annotation is costly. Active preference lear...
The paper explores how data from fixed A/B tests can guide the deployment of adaptive experiments using contextual bandits. By combining off‑policy evaluation with a controlled warm‑start simulation, the authors rank pre‑specified adaptive and non‑adaptive policies using doubly robust estimators. Experiments on synthetic trials and real benchmarks show that adaptive, context‑aware policies outperform fixed allocations when heterogeneity exists, but offer little advantage otherwise.
arXiv:2606. 04503v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has greatly advanced large reasoning models (LRMs), but it requires timely training on a huge fully-annotated dataset.
arXiv:2607. 20083v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training with evaluator feedback on policy-induced samples serves as a major mechanism for improving large language models.
MInTRL (Minimal Intervention Reinforcement Learning) expands exploration in on-policy reinforcement learning by inserting sparse, local corrections into rollouts via a judge-intervention policy. These interventions replace erroneous suffixes and immediately return control to the main policy, allowing the agent to explore beyond its natural trajectory while maintaining on-policy data. The method uses a sequence-level advantage-regression objective, avoiding importance sampling, and demonstrates superior performance on math and code benchmarks compared to standard on-policy and off-policy baselines.
arXiv:2606. 20206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In offline Reinforcement Learning, immediate rewards in logged batch data are often unobserved due to sparse or irregular record-keeping, or censored beyond certain reward values.
arXiv:2608. 07531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Search-augmented language agents should retrieve external information only when necessary and ground their answers in retrieved evidence.
arXiv:2607. 10694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the problem of optimal continual fine-tuning for a pre-trained Foundation Model deployed at a resource-limited device.
The paper introduces a framework for hypothesis testing that combines inexpensive AI judgments with selective human verification to control type‑I and type‑II errors while minimizing cost. It derives an information‑theoretic lower bound on the minimum cost and proposes the SCALE policy, a sequential, cost‑aware strategy that adapts AI scoring and human escalation. SCALE is proven valid for finite samples and asymptotically matches the lower bound, achieving significant savings when both AI and human inputs are valuable.
arXiv:2606. 18327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models (LMs) that faithfully describe their own behavior can more easily be audited, understood, and trusted by users.