English

Entropy-guided sequence weighting for efficient exploration in RL-based LLM fine-tuning

Machine Learning 2025-04-01 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

We introduce Entropy-Guided Sequence Weighting (EGSW), a novel approach that enhances the exploration-exploitation tradeoff by dynamically assigning weights to generated outputs based on their advantage and entropy for Reinforcement Learning-based Large Language Model fine-tuning. EGSW integrates entropy regularization with advantage-based weighting to balance policy updates, enabling efficient exploration in high-dimensional state spaces. By employing temperature-scaled softmax weighting over sequences, EGSW prioritizing high-reward, high-uncertainty steps while maintaining training stability. Although originally developed to improve Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) during large language model (LLM) fine-tuning, EGSW is generalizable to other reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms and can be implemented in both step-wise and trajectory-wise settings. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that EGSW enhances GRPO reasoning ability, yielding improvements in sample efficiency. Future work will explore the application of EGSW to advanced RL methodologies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.22456,
  title  = {Entropy-guided sequence weighting for efficient exploration in RL-based LLM fine-tuning},
  author = {Abdullah Vanlioglu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.22456},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:38:05.148Z