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Oussama Zekri

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Fine-Tuning Discrete Diffusion Models with Policy Gradient Methods

  • Oussama Zekri
  • Nicolas Boulle

Discrete diffusion models have recently gained significant attention due to their ability to process complex discrete structures for language modeling. However, fine-tuning these models with policy gradient methods, as is commonly done in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), remains a challenging task. We propose an efficient, broadly applicable, and theoretically justified policy gradient algorithm, called Score Entropy Policy Optimization (SEPO), for fine-tuning discrete diffusion models over non-differentiable rewards. Our numerical experiments across several discrete generative tasks demonstrate the scalability and efficiency of our method.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Zero-shot Model-based Reinforcement Learning using Large Language Models

  • Abdelhakim Benechehab
  • Youssef Attia El Hili
  • Ambroise Odonnat
  • Oussama Zekri
  • Albert Thomas 0001
  • Giuseppe Paolo
  • Maurizio Filippone
  • Ievgen Redko

The emerging zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their applications in areas extending well beyond natural language processing tasks. In reinforcement learning, while LLMs have been extensively used in text-based environments, their integration with continuous state spaces remains understudied. In this paper, we investigate how pre-trained LLMs can be leveraged to predict in context the dynamics of continuous Markov decision processes. We identify handling multivariate data and incorporating the control signal as key challenges that limit the potential of LLMs' deployment in this setup and propose Disentangled In-Context Learning (DICL) to address them. We present proof-of-concept applications in two reinforcement learning settings: model-based policy evaluation and data-augmented off-policy reinforcement learning, supported by theoretical analysis of the proposed methods. Our experiments further demonstrate that our approach produces well-calibrated uncertainty estimates. We release the code at https://github.com/abenechehab/dicl.

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