Shashank Gupta

Shashank Gupta, Chaitanya Ahuja, Tsung-Yu Lin et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning has emerged as a powerful approach for aligning diffusion models with black-box objectives. Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is the most popular choice of method for policy optimization. While effective in terms of performance, PPO is highly sensitive to hyper-parameters and involves substantial computational overhead. REINFORCE, on the other hand, mitigates some computational complexities such as high memory overhead and sensitive hyper-parameter tuning, but has suboptimal performance due to high-variance and sample inefficiency. While the variance of the REINFORCE can be reduced by sampling multiple actions per input prompt and using a baseline correction term, it still suffers from sample inefficiency. To address these challenges, we systematically analyze the efficiency-effectiveness trade-off between REINFORCE and PPO, and propose leave-one-out PPO (LOOP), a novel RL for diffusion fine-tuning method. LOOP combines variance reduction techniques from REINFORCE, such as sampling multiple actions per input prompt and a baseline correction term, with the robustness and sample efficiency of PPO via clipping and importance sampling. Our results demonstrate that LOOP effectively improves diffusion models on various black-box objectives, and achieves a better balance between computational efficiency and performance.

Shashank Gupta

This dissertation investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) methods can be designed to be safe, sample-efficient, and robust. Framed through the unifying perspective of contextual-bandit RL, the work addresses two major application domains - ranking and recommendation, and text-to-image diffusion models. The first part of the thesis develops theory and algorithms for safe deployment in ranking systems. An exposure-based generalisation bound is derived, leading to a counterfactual risk-minimisation objective whose solution is guaranteed not to underperform the logging policy, even with sparse feedback. This guarantee is extended to doubly robust estimators, enabling safety even under adversarial or misspecified user models and offering practitioners explicit control over permissible utility loss. The second part turns to single-action bandits, where various off-policy estimators are unified within a baseline-correction framework. A closed-form optimal baseline is proposed and shown to minimise both evaluation and policy-gradient variance, thereby improving off-policy learning reliability. The final part examines the trade-offs between efficiency and effectiveness in generative RL. A systematic study of PPO and REINFORCE motivates the Leave-One-Out PPO (LOOP) algorithm, which combines multiple diffusion trajectories with a REINFORCE-style baseline inside PPO's clipped objective. LOOP achieves PPO-level sample efficiency while producing generations that align more faithfully with textual attributes.