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Classical reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize the expected cumulative reward. In this work, we consider the RL setting where the goal is to optimize the quantile of the cumulative reward. We parameterize the policy controlling…

Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO) is an established and effective policy gradient algorithm used for Language Model Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (LM-RLHF). PPO performs well empirically but has a heuristic motivation and…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…

Heuristic algorithms such as simulated annealing, Concorde, and METIS are effective and widely used approaches to find solutions to combinatorial optimization problems. However, they are limited by the high sample complexity required to…

Deep Research agents tackle knowledge-intensive tasks through multi-round retrieval and decision-oriented generation. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been shown to improve performance in this paradigm, its contributions remain…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for facilitating the self-improvement of large language models (LLMs), particularly in the domain of complex reasoning tasks. However,…

To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…

In recent years some researchers have explored the use of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms as key components in the solution of various natural language processing tasks. For instance, some of these algorithms leveraging deep neural…

$K$-nearest neighbor language models ($k$NN-LMs), which integrate retrieval with next-word prediction, have demonstrated strong performance in language modeling as well as downstream NLP benchmarks. These results have led researchers to…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) significantly enhances the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). Current RLVR approaches typically conduct training across all generated tokens, but neglect to explore…

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems are fundamental in online decision-making and have been instrumental in finding an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Function approximations are usually deployed to handle large or…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is vital for optimizing large language models (LLMs). Recent Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) estimates advantages using multiple on-policy outputs per prompt, leading to high computational costs and low…

Reinforcement learning methods typically use Deep Neural Networks to approximate the value functions and policies underlying a Markov Decision Process. Unfortunately, DNN-based RL suffers from a lack of explainability of the resulting…

It is challenging for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to succeed in real-world applications like financial trading and logistic system due to the noisy observation and environment shifting between training and evaluation. Thus, it…

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is commonly used in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback to align large language models (LLMs) with downstream tasks. This paper investigates the feasibility of using PPO for direct reinforcement…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become the standard paradigm for LLM mathematical reasoning, where Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) serves as the mainstream algorithm. We point out two understudied…

Large language models (LLMs) excel at many supervised tasks but often struggle with structured reasoning in unfamiliar settings. This discrepancy suggests that standard fine-tuning pipelines may instill narrow, domain-specific heuristics…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) traditionally relies on scalar reward signals, limiting its ability to leverage the rich semantic knowledge often available in real-world tasks. In contrast, humans learn efficiently by combining numerical…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the dominant paradigm for improving the performance of language models on complex reasoning tasks. Despite the substantial empirical gains demonstrated by RL-based training methods like GRPO, a…

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which is widely adopted by R1-like reasoning models, has advanced mathematical reasoning. Nevertheless, GRPO faces challenges in reward sparsity, verbosity, and inadequate focus on problem…