Yinan Zheng
Publications
Don't Mix Rewards, Mix Policies: Policy Decomposition and Optimization for Multi-Reward RL
Modern large language models (LLMs) are expected not just to answer correctly, but to adapt their behavior to different human values and use cases. As a result, multi-reward reinforcement learning (RL) has become an increasingly important problem for LLMs, where each reward captures a different aspect of desired behavior. However, optimizing with multiple rewards suffers from a more severe alignment tax issue, where different optimization objectives can trade off or even conflict with each other, leading to unstable and inefficient post-training. In this work, we propose PRISM, a new multi-reward RL framework built upon the idea of policy-space decomposition and composition. Instead of compositing different rewards, PRISM optimizes a set of standalone positive policies and a global negative policy. This alleviates the potential conflict during multi-reward policy optimization, while enabling controllability during inference by flexible policy composition. Experiments on scientific reasoning, tool-use reasoning, and helpfulness-safety alignment show that PRISM consistently outperforms existing multi-reward RL baselines, with extra controllability for inference-time preference control.
Unleashing the Potential of Diffusion Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Diffusion models have become a popular choice for decision-making tasks in robotics, and more recently, are also being considered for solving autonomous driving tasks. However, their applications and evaluations in autonomous driving remain limited to simulation-based or laboratory settings. The full strength of diffusion models for large-scale, complex real-world settings, such as End-to-End Autonomous Driving (E2E AD), remains underexplored. In this study, we conducted a systematic and large-scale investigation to unleash the potential of the diffusion models as planners for E2E AD, based on a tremendous amount of real-vehicle data and road testing. Through comprehensive and carefully controlled studies, we identify key insights into the diffusion loss space, trajectory representation, and data scaling that significantly impact E2E planning performance. Moreover, we also provide an effective reinforcement learning post-training strategy to further enhance the safety of the learned planner. The resulting diffusion-based learning framework, Hyper Diffusion Planner} (HDP), is deployed on a real-vehicle platform and evaluated across 6 urban driving scenarios and 200 km of real-world testing, achieving a notable 10x performance improvement over the base model. Our work demonstrates that diffusion models, when properly designed and trained, can serve as effective and scalable E2E AD planners for complex, real-world autonomous driving tasks.