Learning to Answer from Correct Demonstrations
Nirmit Joshi, Gene Li, Siddharth Bhandari, Shiva Prasad Kasiviswanathan, Cong Ma, Nathan Srebro · Oct 17, 2025 · Citations: 0
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Abstract
We study the problem of learning to generate an answer (or completion) to a question (or prompt), where there could be multiple correct answers, any one of which is acceptable at test time. Learning is based on demonstrations of some correct answer to each training question, as in Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT). We formalize the problem as imitation learning (i.e., apprenticeship learning) in contextual bandits, with offline demonstrations from some expert (optimal, or very good) policy, without explicitly observed rewards. In contrast to prior work, which assumes the demonstrator belongs to a bounded-complexity policy class, we propose relying only on the underlying reward model (i.e., specifying which answers are correct) being in a bounded-complexity class, which we argue is a strictly weaker assumption. We show that likelihood-maximization methods can fail in this setting, and instead present an approach that learns to answer nearly as well as the demonstrator, with sample complexity logarithmic in the cardinality of the reward class. Our method is similar to Syed and Schapire 2007, when adapted to a contextual bandit (i.e., single step) setup, but is a simple one-pass online approach that enjoys an "optimistic rate" (i.e., $1/\varepsilon$ when the demonstrator is optimal, versus $1/\varepsilon^2$ in Syed and Schapire), and works even with arbitrarily adaptive demonstrations.