Offline RL by Reward-Weighted Fine-Tuning for Conversation Optimization

This paper recasts the complex offline RL problem as standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) techniques that directly optimizes for rewards. Authors show that their method empirically outperforms state-of-the-art baselines such as SFT and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) across various QA benchmarks. The experiments focus on fixed-horizon conversational policies where the agent either reasons about answers or asks clarifying questions, demonstrating that directly optimizing the reward signal leads to superior accuracy and language quality metrics.