{"id":1153519,"date":"2025-10-27T10:13:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T17:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=1153519"},"modified":"2025-11-04T12:30:50","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T20:30:50","slug":"prompt-tuning-decision-transformers-with-structured-and-scalable-bandits","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/publication\/prompt-tuning-decision-transformers-with-structured-and-scalable-bandits\/","title":{"rendered":"Prompt Tuning Decision Transformers with Structured and Scalable Bandits"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Prompt tuning has emerged as a key technique for adapting large pre-trained Decision Transformers (DTs) in offline Reinforcement Learning (RL), particularly in multi-task and few-shot settings. The Prompting Decision Transformer (PDT) enables task generalization via trajectory prompts sampled uniformly from expert demonstrations &#8212; without accounting for prompt informativeness. In this work, we propose a bandit-based prompt-tuning method that learns to construct optimal trajectory prompts from demonstration data at inference time. We devise a structured bandit architecture operating in the trajectory prompt space, achieving linear rather than combinatorial scaling with prompt size. Additionally, we show that the pre-trained PDT itself can serve as a powerful feature extractor for the bandit, enabling efficient reward modeling across various environments. We theoretically establish regret bounds and demonstrate empirically that our method consistently enhances performance across a wide range of tasks, high-dimensional environments, and out-of-distribution scenarios, outperforming existing baselines in prompt tuning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Prompt tuning has emerged as a key technique for adapting large pre-trained Decision Transformers (DTs) in offline Reinforcement Learning (RL), particularly in multi-task and few-shot settings. The Prompting Decision Transformer (PDT) enables task generalization via trajectory prompts sampled uniformly from expert demonstrations &#8212; without accounting for prompt informativeness. In this work, we propose a bandit-based [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"NeurIPS 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