Predicting Long Term Sequential Policy Value Using Softer Surrogates

Performing policy evaluation in education, healthcare and online commerce can be challenging, because it can require waiting substantial amounts of time to observe outcomes over the desired horizon of interest. While offline evaluation methods can be used to estimate the performance of a new decision policy from historical data in some cases, such methods struggle when the new policy involves novel actions or is being run in a new decision process with potentially different dynamics. Here we consider how to estimate the full-horizon value of a new decision policy using only short-horizon data from the new policy, and historical full-horizon data from a different behavior policy. We introduce two new estimators for this setting, including a doubly robust estimator, and provide formal analysis of their properties. Our empirical results on two realistic simulators, of HIV treatment and sepsis treatment, show that our methods can often provide informative estimates of a new decision policy ten times faster than waiting for the full horizon, highlighting that it may be possible to quickly identify if a new decision policy, involving new actions, is better or worse than existing past policies.

Improving Parallel Program Performance Through DSL-Driven Code Generation with LLM Optimizers

Mapping computations to processors and assigning data to memory are critical for maximizing performance in parallel programming. These mapping decisions are managed through the development of specialized low-level system code, called mappers, crafted by performance engineers. Each mapper is tailored to a specific application and optimized for the underlying machine architecture, a process that requires days of refinement and tuning from an expert. Despite advances in system research, automating mapper generation remains a challenge due to the complexity of making millions of decisions to find the optimal solution and generate the solution as code. We introduce an approach that leverages recent advances in LLM-based optimizers for mapper design. In under ten minutes, our method automatically discovers mappers that surpass human expert designs in scientific applications by up to 1.34X speedup. For parallel matrix multiplication algorithms, our mapper achieves up to 1.31X of the expert-designed solution. To achieve this, we simplify the complexity of low-level code generation by introducing a domain-specific language (DSL) that abstracts the low-level system programming details and defines a structured search space for LLMs to explore. To maximize the application performance, we use an LLM optimizer to improve an agentic system that generates the mapper code. As a result, this approach significantly reduces the workload for performance engineers while achieving substantial performance gains across diverse applications. Finally, our results demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM-based optimization in system design and suggest its potential for addressing other complex system challenges.

EVOLvE: Evaluating and Optimizing LLMs For Exploration

Despite their success in many domains, large language models (LLMs) remain under-studied in scenarios requiring optimal decision-making under uncertainty. This is crucial as many real-world applications, ranging from personalized recommendations to healthcare interventions, demand that LLMs not only predict but also actively learn to make optimal decisions through exploration. In this work, we measure LLMs' (in)ability to make optimal decisions in bandits, a state-less reinforcement learning setting relevant to many applications. We develop a comprehensive suite of environments, including both context-free and contextual bandits with varying task difficulties, to benchmark LLMs' performance. Motivated by the existence of optimal exploration algorithms, we propose efficient ways to integrate this algorithmic knowledge into LLMs: by providing explicit algorithm-guided support during inference; and through algorithm distillation via in-context demonstrations and fine-tuning, using synthetic data generated from these algorithms. Impressively, these techniques allow us to achieve superior exploration performance with smaller models, surpassing larger models on various tasks. We conducted an extensive ablation study to shed light on various factors, such as task difficulty and data representation, that influence the efficiency of LLM exploration. Additionally, we conduct a rigorous analysis of the LLM's exploration efficiency using the concept of regret, linking its ability to explore to the model size and underlying algorithm.

Trace is the New AutoDiff -- Unlocking Efficient Optimization of Computational Workflows

We study a class of optimization problems motivated by automating the design and update of AI systems like coding assistants, robots, and copilots. We propose an end-to-end optimization framework, Trace, which treats the computational workflow of an AI system as a graph akin to neural networks, based on a generalization of back-propagation. Optimization of computational workflows often involves rich feedback (e.g. console output or user's responses), heterogeneous parameters (e.g. prompts, hyper-parameters, codes), and intricate objectives (beyond maximizing a score). Moreover, its computation graph can change dynamically with the inputs and parameters. We frame a new mathematical setup of iterative optimization, Optimization with Trace Oracle (OPTO), to capture and abstract these properties so as to design optimizers that work across many domains. In OPTO, an optimizer receives an execution trace along with feedback on the computed output and updates parameters iteratively. Trace is the tool to implement OPTO in practice. Trace has a Python interface that efficiently converts a computational workflow into an OPTO instance using a PyTorch-like interface. Using Trace, we develop a general-purpose LLM-based optimizer called OptoPrime that can effectively solve OPTO problems. In empirical studies, we find that OptoPrime is capable of first-order numerical optimization, prompt optimization, hyper-parameter tuning, robot controller design, code debugging, etc., and is often competitive with specialized optimizers for each domain. We believe that Trace, OptoPrime and the OPTO framework will enable the next generation of interactive agents that automatically adapt using various kinds of feedback. Website: https://microsoft.github.io/Trace

OPERA: Automatic Offline Policy Evaluation with Re-weighted Aggregates of Multiple Estimators

Offline policy evaluation (OPE) allows us to evaluate and estimate a new sequential decision-making policy's performance by leveraging historical interaction data collected from other policies. Evaluating a new policy online without a confident estimate of its performance can lead to costly, unsafe, or hazardous outcomes, especially in education and healthcare. Several OPE estimators have been proposed in the last decade, many of which have hyperparameters and require training. Unfortunately, choosing the best OPE algorithm for each task and domain is still unclear. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that adaptively blends a set of OPE estimators given a dataset without relying on an explicit selection using a statistical procedure. We prove that our estimator is consistent and satisfies several desirable properties for policy evaluation. Additionally, we demonstrate that when compared to alternative approaches, our estimator can be used to select higher-performing policies in healthcare and robotics. Our work contributes to improving ease of use for a general-purpose, estimator-agnostic, off-policy evaluation framework for offline RL.

The Importance of Directional Feedback for LLM-based Optimizers

We study the potential of using large language models (LLMs) as an interactive optimizer for solving maximization problems in a text space using natural language and numerical feedback. Inspired by the classical optimization literature, we classify the natural language feedback into directional and non-directional, where the former is a generalization of the first-order feedback to the natural language space. We find that LLMs are especially capable of optimization when they are provided with {directional feedback}. Based on this insight, we design a new LLM-based optimizer that synthesizes directional feedback from the historical optimization trace to achieve reliable improvement over iterations. Empirically, we show our LLM-based optimizer is more stable and efficient in solving optimization problems, from maximizing mathematical functions to optimizing prompts for writing poems, compared with existing techniques.

LLF-Bench: Benchmark for Interactive Learning from Language Feedback

We introduce a new benchmark, LLF-Bench (Learning from Language Feedback Benchmark; pronounced as "elf-bench"), to evaluate the ability of AI agents to interactively learn from natural language feedback and instructions. Learning from language feedback (LLF) is essential for people, largely because the rich information this feedback provides can help a learner avoid much of trial and error and thereby speed up the learning process. Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently enabled AI agents to comprehend natural language -- and hence AI agents can potentially benefit from language feedback during learning like humans do. But existing interactive benchmarks do not assess this crucial capability: they either use numeric reward feedback or require no learning at all (only planning or information retrieval). LLF-Bench is designed to fill this omission. LLF-Bench is a diverse collection of sequential decision-making tasks that includes user recommendation, poem writing, navigation, and robot control. The objective of an agent is to interactively solve these tasks based on their natural-language instructions and the feedback received after taking actions. Crucially, to ensure that the agent actually "learns" from the feedback, LLF-Bench implements several randomization techniques (such as paraphrasing and environment randomization) to ensure that the task isn't familiar to the agent and that the agent is robust to various verbalizations. In addition, LLF-Bench provides a unified OpenAI Gym interface for all its tasks and allows the users to easily configure the information the feedback conveys (among suggestion, explanation, and instantaneous performance) to study how agents respond to different types of feedback. Together, these features make LLF-Bench a unique research platform for developing and testing LLF agents.

MoCa: Measuring Human-Language Model Alignment on Causal and Moral Judgment Tasks

Human commonsense understanding of the physical and social world is organized around intuitive theories. These theories support making causal and moral judgments. When something bad happens, we naturally ask: who did what, and why? A rich literature in cognitive science has studied people's causal and moral intuitions. This work has revealed a number of factors that systematically influence people's judgments, such as the violation of norms and whether the harm is avoidable or inevitable. We collected a dataset of stories from 24 cognitive science papers and developed a system to annotate each story with the factors they investigated. Using this dataset, we test whether large language models (LLMs) make causal and moral judgments about text-based scenarios that align with those of human participants. On the aggregate level, alignment has improved with more recent LLMs. However, using statistical analyses, we find that LLMs weigh the different factors quite differently from human participants. These results show how curated, challenge datasets combined with insights from cognitive science can help us go beyond comparisons based merely on aggregate metrics: we uncover LLMs implicit tendencies and show to what extent these align with human intuitions.

Waypoint Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Supervised Learning with Intermediate Targets

Despite the recent advancements in offline reinforcement learning via supervised learning (RvS) and the success of the decision transformer (DT) architecture in various domains, DTs have fallen short in several challenging benchmarks. The root cause of this underperformance lies in their inability to seamlessly connect segments of suboptimal trajectories. To overcome this limitation, we present a novel approach to enhance RvS methods by integrating intermediate targets. We introduce the Waypoint Transformer (WT), using an architecture that builds upon the DT framework and conditioned on automatically-generated waypoints. The results show a significant increase in the final return compared to existing RvS methods, with performance on par or greater than existing state-of-the-art temporal difference learning-based methods. Additionally, the performance and stability improvements are largest in the most challenging environments and data configurations, including AntMaze Large Play/Diverse and Kitchen Mixed/Partial.

Reinforcement Learning Tutor Better Supported Lower Performers in a Math Task

Resource limitations make it hard to provide all students with one of the most effective educational interventions: personalized instruction. Reinforcement learning could be a key tool to reduce the development cost and improve the effectiveness of intelligent tutoring software that aims to provide the right support, at the right time, to a student. Here we illustrate that deep reinforcement learning can be used to provide adaptive pedagogical support to students learning about the concept of volume in a narrative storyline software. Using explainable artificial intelligence tools, we extracted interpretable insights about the pedagogical policy learned and demonstrated that the resulting policy had similar performance in a different student population. Most importantly, in both studies, the reinforcement-learning narrative system had the largest benefit for those students with the lowest initial pretest scores, suggesting the opportunity for AI to adapt and provide support for those most in need.