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Auteurs principaux: Feng, Songtao, Fu, Jie
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23927
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author Feng, Songtao
Fu, Jie
author_facet Feng, Songtao
Fu, Jie
contents Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has achieved great empirical success in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preference, and it is of great importance to study the statistical efficiency of RLHF algorithms from a theoretical perspective. In this work, we consider the online RLHF setting where the preference data is revealed during the learning process and study action value function approximation. We design a model-free posterior sampling algorithm for online RLHF inspired by Thompson sampling and provide its theoretical guarantee. Specifically, we adopt Bellman eluder (BE) dimension as the complexity measure of the function class and establish $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret bound for the proposed algorithm with other multiplicative factor depending on the horizon, BE dimension and the $log$-bracketing number of the function class. Further, in the analysis, we first establish the concentration-type inequality of the squared Bellman error bound based on the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) generalization bound, which plays the crucial rules in obtaining the eluder-type regret bound and may be of independent interest.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_23927
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Thompson Sampling in Online RLHF with General Function Approximation
Feng, Songtao
Fu, Jie
Machine Learning
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has achieved great empirical success in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preference, and it is of great importance to study the statistical efficiency of RLHF algorithms from a theoretical perspective. In this work, we consider the online RLHF setting where the preference data is revealed during the learning process and study action value function approximation. We design a model-free posterior sampling algorithm for online RLHF inspired by Thompson sampling and provide its theoretical guarantee. Specifically, we adopt Bellman eluder (BE) dimension as the complexity measure of the function class and establish $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret bound for the proposed algorithm with other multiplicative factor depending on the horizon, BE dimension and the $log$-bracketing number of the function class. Further, in the analysis, we first establish the concentration-type inequality of the squared Bellman error bound based on the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) generalization bound, which plays the crucial rules in obtaining the eluder-type regret bound and may be of independent interest.
title Thompson Sampling in Online RLHF with General Function Approximation
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23927