We study personalized multi-agent average reward TD learning, in which a collection of agents interacts with different environments and jointly learns their respective value functions. We focus on the setting where there exists a shared linear representation, and the agents' optimal weights collectively lie in an unknown linear subspace. Inspired by the recent success of personalized federated learning (PFL), we study the convergence of cooperative single-timescale TD learning in which agents iteratively estimate the common subspace and local heads. We showed that this decomposition can filter out conflicting signals, effectively mitigating the negative impacts of ``misaligned'' signals, and achieving linear speedup. The main technical challenges lie in the heterogeneity, the Markovian sampling, and their intricate interplay in shaping error evolutions. Specifically, not only are the error dynamics of multiple variables closely interconnected, but there is also no direct contraction for the principal angle distance between the optimal subspace and the estimated subspace. We hope our analytical techniques can be useful to inspire research on deeper exploration into leveraging common structures. Experiments are provided to show the benefits of learning via a shared structure to the more general control problem.
Rethinking Personalized Reward Modeling for LLMs under Preference Heterogeneity via Group-Debiased Federated Learning
Institute of Engineering Research, Korea University（韩国大学工程研究所）；Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI, KAIST（韩国科学技术院金在哲人工智能研究生院）；Industrial Management Engineering, Korea University（韩国大学产业管理工程学院）
Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) aims to learn personalized models for each client based on the knowledge across all clients in a privacy-preserving manner. Existing PFL methods generally assume that the underlying global data across all clients are uniformly distributed without considering the long-tail distribution. The joint problem of data heterogeneity and long-tail distribution in the FL environment is more challenging and severely affects the performance of personalized models. In this paper, we propose a PFL method called Federated Learning with Adversarial Feature Augmentation (F…
Semantic Communication in Dynamic Channel Scenarios: Collaborative Optimization of Dual-Pipeline Joint Source-Channel Coding and Personalized Federated Learning
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Institute of Computer Application Technology Norinco Groups（中国兵器工业集团计算机应用技术研究所）
The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；NEC Laboratories America（美国NEC实验室）；Florida International University（佛罗里达国际大学）；AWS AI Labs, Amazon（亚马逊AWS人工智能实验室）
Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) which collaboratively trains a federated model while considering local clients under privacy constraints has attracted much attention. Despite its popularity, it has been observed that existing PFL approaches result in sub-optimal solutions when the joint distribution among local clients diverges. To address this issue, we present Federated Modular Network (FedMN), a novel PFL approach that adaptively selects sub-modules from a module pool to assemble heterogeneous neural architectures for different clients. FedMN adopts a light-weighted routing hypernetwo…
Person re-identification (ReID) aims to re-identify a person from non-overlapping camera views. Since person ReID data contains sensitive personal information, researchers have adopted federated learning, an emerging distributed training method, to mitigate the privacy leakage risks. However, existing studies rely on data labels that are laborious and time-consuming to obtain. We present FedUReID, a federated unsupervised person ReID system to learn person ReID models without any labels while preserving privacy. FedUReID enables in-situ model training on edges with unlabeled data. A cloud serv…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；China Academy of Information and Communications Technology（中国信息通信研究院）
Federated Learning (FL) over wireless network enables data-conscious services by leveraging the ubiquitous intelligence at network edge for privacy-preserving model training. As the proliferation of context-aware services, the diversified personal preferences causes disagreeing conditional distributions among user data, which leads to poor inference performance. In this sense, clustered federated learning is proposed to group user devices with similar preference and provide each cluster with a personalized model. This calls for innovative design in edge association that involves user clusterin…
The Reward Model Selection Crisis in Personalized Alignment
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh（信息学院，爱丁堡大学）；Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（科技研究局）；Samsung AI Research Center（三星人工智能研究中心）
Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；Microsoft Research NYC（微软研究院纽约分院）；Texas A&M University（德州农工大学）；University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）
In an era of countless content offerings, recommender systems alleviate information overload by providing users with personalized content suggestions. Due to the scarcity of explicit user feedback, modern recommender systems typically optimize for the same fixed combination of implicit feedback signals across all users. However, this approach disregards a growing body of work highlighting that (i) implicit signals can be used by users in diverse ways, signaling anything from satisfaction to active dislike, and (ii) different users communicate preferences in different ways. We propose applying …
PersRM-R1: Enhance Personalized Reward Modeling with Reinforcement Learning
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；University of Hamburg（汉堡大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Learning Personalized Ad Impact via Contextual Reinforcement Learning under Delayed Rewards
Department of Statistics University of Chicago（芝加哥大学统计学系）；Mendoza College of Business University of Notre Dame（诺特丹大学梅多扎商学院）；Department of Computer Science and Data Science University of Chicago（芝加哥大学计算机科学与数据科学系）
Sparse Mixture-of-Experts Reward Models Learn Interpretable and Specialized Experts for Personalized Preference Modeling
Saarland University（萨尔兰大学）；Independent Researcher（独立研究者）；Bielefeld University（比勒菲尔德大学）；Max Planck Institute for Software Systems（马克斯·普朗克软件系统研究所）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息研究所）
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
A growing trend for value-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is to capture more information than scalar value functions in the value network. One of the most well-known methods in this branch is distributional RL, which models return distribution instead of scalar value. In another line of work, hybrid reward architectures (HRA) in RL have studied to model source-specific value functions for each source of reward, which is also shown to be beneficial in performance. To fully inherit the benefits of distributional RL and hybrid reward architectures, we introduce Multi-Dimensional Dist…
FedPDPO: Federated Personalized Direct Preference Optimization for Large Language Model Alignment
College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China（智能与计算学院，天津大学，天津，中国）；College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore（计算与数据科学学院，南洋理工大学，新加坡）
School of Computer Science, McGill University（麦吉尔大学计算机科学学院）；Department of Electrical, Computer, and Software Engineering, McGill University（麦吉尔大学电气、计算机与软件工程系）
Reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning policies that can solve complex problems. However, manually specifying a good reward function can be difficult, especially for intricate tasks. Inverse reinforcement learning offers a useful paradigm to learn the underlying reward function directly from expert demonstrations. Yet in reality, the corpus of demonstrations may contain trajectories arising from a diverse set of underlying reward functions rather than a single one. Thus, in inverse reinforcement learning, it is useful to consider such a decomposition. The options framework in rei…
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Nuffield College, Oxford University（牛津大学纳菲尔德学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Oxford-Man Institute, Oxford University（牛津大学牛津-曼研究所）
This paper proposes a novel approach for constructing effective personalized policies when the observed data lacks counter-factual information, is biased and possesses many features. The approach is applicable in a wide variety of settings from healthcare to advertising to education to finance. These settings have in common that the decision maker can observe, for each previous instance, an array of features of the instance, the action taken in that instance, and the reward realized -- but not the rewards of actions that were not taken: the counterfactual information. Learning in such settings…
A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to characterize the phenomenon that users' preferences towards different items vary differently over time. In the disjoint payoff model, the reward of playing an arm is determined by an arm-specific preference vector, which is piecewise-stationary with asynchronous and distinct changes across different arms. An efficient learning algorithm that is adaptive to abrup…
University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；Etsy Inc.（Etsy公司）；Yahoo! Research（雅虎研究院）；Facebook（脸书）
Learning a good representation of text is key to many recommendation applications. Examples include news recommendation where texts to be recommended are constantly published everyday. However, most existing recommendation techniques, such as matrix factorization based methods, mainly rely on interaction histories to learn representations of items. While latent factors of items can be learned effectively from user interaction data, in many cases, such data is not available, especially for newly emerged items. In this work, we aim to address the problem of personalized recommendation for comple…
University of Kentucky（肯塔基大学）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
Task-oriented dialog systems enable users to accomplish tasks using natural language. State-of-the-art systems respond to users in the same way regardless of their personalities, although personalizing dialogues can lead to higher levels of adoption and better user experiences. Building personalized dialog systems is an important, yet challenging endeavor and only a handful of works took on the challenge. Most existing works rely on supervised learning approaches and require laborious and expensive labeled training data for each user profile. Additionally, collecting and labeling data for each…
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Visual attributes, which refer to human-labeled semantic annotations, have gained increasing popularity in a wide range of real world applications. Generally, the existing attribute learning methods fall into two categories: one focuses on learning user-specific labels separately for different attributes, while the other one focuses on learning crowd-sourced global labels jointly for multiple attributes. However, both categories ignore the joint effect of the two mentioned factors: the personal diversity with respect to the global consensus; and the intrinsic correlation among multiple attribu…
GRADE: Personalized Multi-Task Fusion via Group-relative Reinforcement Learning with Adaptive Dirichlet Exploration
Institute for Clarity in Documentation（文档清晰研究所）；Inria Paris-Rocquencourt（巴黎-罗克琴特研究所）；Rajiv Gandhi University（拉贾·甘地大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Palmer Research Laboratories（帕勒尔研究实验室）
We consider offline reinforcement learning (RL) with heterogeneous agents under severe data scarcity, i.e., we only observe a single historical trajectory for every agent under an unknown, potentially sub-optimal policy. We find that the performance of state-of-the-art offline and model-based RL methods degrade significantly given such limited data availability, even for commonly perceived "solved" benchmark settings such as "MountainCar" and "CartPole". To address this challenge, we propose PerSim, a model-based offline RL approach which first learns a personalized simulator for each agent by…
Reinforcement learning is concerned with identifying reward-maximizing behaviour policies in environments that are initially unknown. State-of-the-art reinforcement learning approaches, such as deep Q-networks, are model-free and learn to act effectively across a wide range of environments such as Atari games, but require huge amounts of data. Model-based techniques are more data-efficient, but need to acquire explicit knowledge about the environment. In this paper, we take a step towards using model-based techniques in environments with a high-dimensional visual state space by demonstrating t…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success as a general framework for learning how to make decisions. However, this success relies on the interactive hand-tuning of a reward function by RL experts. On the other hand, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to learn a reward function from readily-obtained human demonstrations. Yet, IRL suffers from two major limitations: 1) reward ambiguity - there are an infinite number of possible reward functions that could explain an expert's demonstration and 2) heterogeneity - human experts adopt varying strategies and preferences, whi…
Fully Decentralized Joint Learning of Personalized Models and Collaboration Graphs
GE – Global Research（通用电气全球研究中心）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Univ Lyon（里昂大学）；UJM-Saint-Etienne（圣艾蒂安让·莫内大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Laboratoire Hubert Curien（于贝尔·居里安实验室）
Automated next-best action recommendation for each customer in a sequential, dynamic and interactive context has been widely needed in natural, social and business decision-making. Personalized next-best action recommendation must involve past, current and future customer demographics and circumstances (states) and behaviors, long-range sequential interactions between customers and decision-makers, multi-sequence interactions between states, behaviors and actions, and their reactions to their counterpart's actions. No existing modeling theories and tools, including Markovian decision processes…
We study the problem of reinforcement learning for a task encoded by a reward machine. The task is defined over a set of properties in the environment, called atomic propositions, and represented by Boolean variables. One unrealistic assumption commonly used in the literature is that the truth values of these propositions are accurately known. In real situations, however, these truth values are uncertain since they come from sensors that suffer from imperfections. At the same time, reward machines can be difficult to model explicitly, especially when they encode complicated tasks. We develop a…
Bilkent University（比尔肯特大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
We introduce a new class of reinforcement learning methods referred to as {\em episodic multi-armed bandits} (eMAB). In eMAB the learner proceeds in {\em episodes}, each composed of several {\em steps}, in which it chooses an action and observes a feedback signal. Moreover, in each step, it can take a special action, called the $stop$ action, that ends the current episode. After the $stop$ action is taken, the learner collects a terminal reward, and observes the costs and terminal rewards associated with each step of the episode. The goal of the learner is to maximize its cumulative gain (i.e.…
Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require optimization of an objective that is non-linear in cumulative rewards for which dynamic programming cannot be applied directly. For example, in a resource allocation problem, one of the objectives is to maximize long-term fairness among the users. We notice that when an agent aim to optimize some function of the sum of rewards is considered, the problem loses its …
Dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs) are personalized, adaptive, multi-stage treatment plans that adapt treatment decisions both to an individual's initial features and to intermediate outcomes and features at each subsequent stage, which are affected by decisions in prior stages. Examples include personalized first- and second-line treatments of chronic conditions like diabetes, cancer, and depression, which adapt to patient response to first-line treatment, disease progression, and individual characteristics. While existing literature mostly focuses on estimating the optimal DTR from offline dat…
Multi-agent active perception is a task where a team of agents cooperatively gathers observations to compute a joint estimate of a hidden variable. The task is decentralized and the joint estimate can only be computed after the task ends by fusing observations of all agents. The objective is to maximize the accuracy of the estimate. The accuracy is quantified by a centralized prediction reward determined by a centralized decision-maker who perceives the observations gathered by all agents after the task ends. In this paper, we model multi-agent active perception as a decentralized partially ob…
