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Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou

This paper aims to overcome a major obstacle in scaling RL for reasoning with LLMs, namely the collapse of policy entropy. Such phenomenon is consistently observed across vast RL runs without entropy intervention, where the policy entropy…

Diffusion models have garnered widespread attention in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for their powerful expressiveness and multimodality. It has been verified that utilizing diffusion policies can significantly improve the performance of RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Shutong Ding , Ke Hu , Zhenhao Zhang , Kan Ren , Weinan Zhang , Jingyi Yu , Jingya Wang , Ye Shi

The exploration-exploitation (EE) trade-off is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs). With Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), training tends to be exploitation driven: entropy decreases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Zhaochun Li , Chen Wang , Jionghao Bai , Shisheng Cui , Ge Lan , Zhou Zhao , Yue Wang

Reinforcement Learning, particularly through policy gradient methods, has played a central role in enabling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, the optimization stability of policy gradients in this setting remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Luckeciano C. Melo , Alessandro Abate , Yarin Gal

Large language models are commonly trained through multi-stage post-training: first via RLHF, then fine-tuned for other downstream objectives. Yet even small downstream updates can compromise earlier learned behaviors (e.g., safety),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Mahdi Sabbaghi , George Pappas , Adel Javanmard , Hamed Hassani

Most reinforcement learning methods rely heavily on dense, well-normalized environment rewards. DreamerV3 recently introduced a model-based method with a number of tricks that mitigate these limitations, achieving state-of-the-art on a wide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Ryan Sullivan , Akarsh Kumar , Shengyi Huang , John P. Dickerson , Joseph Suarez

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has become the predominant algorithm for on-policy reinforcement learning due to its scalability and empirical robustness across domains. However, there is a significant disconnect between the underlying…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising paradigm for post-training reasoning models. However, group-based methods such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) face a critical dilemma in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yuning Wu , Ke Wang , Devin Chen , Kai Wei

We propose a new sample-efficient methodology, called Supervised Policy Update (SPU), for deep reinforcement learning. Starting with data generated by the current policy, SPU formulates and solves a constrained optimization problem in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Quan Vuong , Yiming Zhang , Keith W. Ross

We propose a metalearning approach for learning gradient-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. The idea is to evolve a differentiable loss function, such that an agent, which optimizes its policy to minimize this loss, will achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-01 Rein Houthooft , Richard Y. Chen , Phillip Isola , Bradly C. Stadie , Filip Wolski , Jonathan Ho , Pieter Abbeel

Enhancing LLMs with the ability to actively search external knowledge is crucial for complex and real-world tasks. Current approaches either rely on prompting to elicit the model's innate agent capabilities, or suffer from performance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Chenyang Gu , Yewen Pu , Bruce Yang , Xiaofan Li , Huan Gao

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for post-training large language models. While Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely adopted, its coarse credit assignment uniformly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Gengsheng Li , Tianyu Yang , Junfeng Fang , Mingyang Song , Mao Zheng , Haiyun Guo , Dan Zhang , Jinqiao Wang , Tat-Seng Chua

Recent advancements have established Reinforcement Learning (RL) as a pivotal paradigm for aligning generative models with human intent. However, group-based optimization frameworks (e.g., GRPO) face a critical limitation: the rapid decay…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Sujie Hu , Chubin Chen , Jiashu Zhu , Jiahong Wu , Xiangxiang Chu , Xiu Li

Language model (LM) post-training (or alignment) involves maximizing a reward function that is derived from preference annotations. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a popular offline alignment method that trains a policy directly on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Adam Fisch , Jacob Eisenstein , Vicky Zayats , Alekh Agarwal , Ahmad Beirami , Chirag Nagpal , Pete Shaw , Jonathan Berant

Group Relative Policy Optimization(GRPO) has become a cornerstone of modern reinforcement learning alignment, prized for its efficacy in foregoing an explicit value-critic by leveraging reward normalization across sampled trajectory…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Redacted by arXiv

Entropic regularization of policies in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a commonly used heuristic to ensure that the learned policy explores the state-space sufficiently before overfitting to a local optimal policy. The primary motivation for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Hisham Husain , Kamil Ciosek , Ryota Tomioka

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is among the most widely used deep reinforcement learning algorithms, yet its theoretical foundations remain incomplete. Most importantly, convergence and understanding of fundamental PPO advantages remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Leif Doering , Daniel Schmidt , Moritz Melcher , Sebastian Kassing , Benedikt Wille , Tilman Aach , Simon Weissmann

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are promising alternatives to autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), as they potentially allow higher inference throughput. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a crucial component for dLLMs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yuchen Zhu , Wei Guo , Jaemoo Choi , Petr Molodyk , Bo Yuan , Molei Tao , Yongxin Chen

Reinforcement learning algorithms such as group-relative policy optimization (GRPO) have shown strong potential for improving the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models. While a growing body of work seeks to improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Wenquan Lu , Hai Huang , Enqi Liu , Randall Balestriero