Kintan Saha

S. R. Eshwar, Aniruddha Mukherjee, Kintan Saha et al.

In a recent work, we proposed Reliable Policy Iteration (RPI), that restores policy iteration's monotonicity-of-value-estimates property to the function approximation setting. Here, we assess the robustness of RPI's empirical performance on two classical control tasks -- CartPole and Inverted Pendulum -- under changes to neural network and environmental parameters. Relative to DQN, Double DQN, DDPG, TD3, and PPO, RPI reaches near-optimal performance early and sustains this policy as training proceeds. Because deep RL methods are often hampered by sample inefficiency, training instability, and hyperparameter sensitivity, our results highlight RPI's promise as a more reliable alternative.

Debangshu Banerjee, Kintan Saha, Aditya Gopalan

Alignment of large language models (LLMs) typically involves training a reward model on preference data, followed by policy optimization with respect to the reward model. However, optimizing policies with respect to a single reward model estimate can render it vulnerable to inaccuracies in the reward model. We empirically study the variability of reward model training on open-source benchmarks. We observe that independently trained reward models on the same preference dataset can exhibit substantial disagreement, highlighting the instability of current alignment strategies. Employing a theoretical model, we demonstrate that variability in reward model estimation can cause overfitting, leading to the risk of performance degradation. To mitigate this risk, we propose a variance-aware policy optimization framework for preference-based alignment. The key ingredient of the framework is a new policy regularizer that incorporates reward model variance estimates. We show that variance-aware policy optimization provably reduces the risk of outputting a worse policy than the default. Experiments across diverse LLM and reward model configurations confirm that our approach yields more stable and robust alignment than the standard (variance-unaware) pipeline.