README.md

A Snapshot of Influence: A Local Data Attribution Framework for Online Reinforcement Learning

This repository contains the official implementation of
A Snapshot of Influence: A Local Data Attribution Framework for Online Reinforcement Learning (NeurIPS 2025 ${\textsf{\color{red}oral}}$), the first framework of data attribution for online reinforcement learning. We also propose Iterative Influence-Based Filtering (IIF), an algorithm that improves sample efficiency, computational efficiency, and final returns for online RL.

Our paper can be accessed here.

Repository Structure

This repository is organized as follows:

• traditional-rl/: contains data influence calculation in our local data attribution framework and experiments in traditional RL environments in Gymnasium, using IIF to improve training.
• rlhf-toxicity/: contains experiment on using IIF to improve the performance of RLHF in the task of LLM detoxification.

Citation

@inproceedings{hu2025snapshot,
    title={A Snapshot of Influence: A Local Data Attribution Framework for Online Reinforcement Learning},
    author={Hu, Yuzheng and Wu, Fan and Ye, Haotian and Forsyth, David and Zou, James and Jiang, Nan and Ma, Jiaqi W and Zhao, Han},
    booktitle={The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
    year={2025},
    url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=sYK4yPDuT1}
}