Qiwen Cui

Qiwen Cui Ph.D. student Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington Email: qwcui at cs (dot) washington (dot) edu Google Scholar

About me

I am a third-year Ph.D. student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. I am very fortunate to be advised by Professor Simon Shaolei Du. Prior to starting my Ph.D. study, I did my undergrad in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Peking University advised by Professor Zaiwen Wen. I had a great summer working with Professor Lin F. Yang in 2020, who led me into the world of reinforcement learning theory.

My research interests are in reinforcement learning. I have been working on designing provably efficient multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms for the offline case (exploiting the dataset) and the online case (exploring the structured environment). I have also done research in optimization and game theory. I am also interested in the role of RL(HF) in the performance of LLMs.

Selected Publications

Offline Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

• Provably Efficient Offline Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning via Strategy-wise Bonus
  Qiwen Cui, Simon S. Du
  Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2022
  

• When is Offline Two-Player Zero-Sum Markov Game Solvable?
  Qiwen Cui, Simon S. Du
  Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2022
  

• Minimax Sample Complexity for Turn-based Stochastic Game
  Qiwen Cui, Lin F. Yang
  Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 2021
  

Online Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

• Refined Sample Complexity for Markov Games with Independent Linear Function Approximation
  Yan Dai, Qiwen Cui, Simon S. Du
  ArXiv https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07082
  

• A Black-box Approach for Non-stationary Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
  Haozhe Jiang, Qiwen Cui, Zhihan Xiong, Maryam Fazel, Simon S. Du
  International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2024
  

• Breaking the Curse of Multiagents in a Large State Space: RL in Markov Games with Independent Linear Function Approximation
  Qiwen Cui, Kaiqing Zhang, Simon S. Du
  The 36th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT) 2023
  

Learning in Congestion Games

• Learning Optimal Tax Design in Nonatomic Congestion Games
  Qiwen Cui, Maryam Fazel, Simon S. Du
  ArXiv https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.07437
  

• Offline Congestion Games: How Feedback Type Affects Data Coverage Requirement
  Haozhe Jiang*, Qiwen Cui*, Zhihan Xiong, Maryam Fazel, Simon S. Du
  International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2023
  

• Learning in Congestion Games with Bandit Feedback
  Qiwen Cui*, Zhihan Xiong*, Maryam Fazel, Simon S. Du
  Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2022
  

Randomized Exploration

• Near-Optimal Randomized Exploration for Tabular MDP
  Zhihan Xiong*, Ruoqi Shen*, Qiwen Cui*, Maryam Fazel, Simon S. Du
  Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2022
  

• Randomized Exploration for Reinforcement Learning with General Value Function Approximation
  Haque Ishfaq*, Qiwen Cui*, Viet Nguyen, Alex Ayoub, Zhuoran Yang, Zhaoran Wang, Doina Precup, Lin F Yang
  International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2021