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Related papers: Improving Multi-Step Reasoning Abilities of Large …

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We propose DiFFPO, Diffusion Fast and Furious Policy Optimization, a unified framework for training masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs) to reason not only better (furious), but also faster via reinforcement learning (RL). We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Hanyang Zhao , Dawen Liang , Wenpin Tang , David Yao , Nathan Kallus

Balancing exploration and exploitation during reinforcement learning fine-tuning of generative models presents a critical challenge, as existing approaches rely on fixed divergence regularization that creates an inherent dilemma: strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Jiajun Fan , Tong Wei , Chaoran Cheng , Yuxin Chen , Ge Liu

Traditional RLHF-based LLM alignment methods explicitly maximize the expected rewards from a separate reward model. More recent supervised alignment methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) circumvent this phase to avoid problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Abhijnan Nath , Changsoo Jung , Ethan Seefried , Nikhil Krishnaswamy

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), also known as batch RL, aims to optimize policy from a large pre-recorded dataset without interaction with the environment. This setting offers the promise of utilizing diverse, pre-collected datasets to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Qiang He , Xinwen Hou

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) enhances Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning but suffers from advantage collapse on ``hard samples'' where all rollouts fail. This lack of variance eliminates crucial learning signals.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Xinyu Lu , Kaiqi Zhang , Jinglin Yang , Boxi Cao , Yaojie Lu , Hongyu Lin , Min He , Xianpei Han , Le Sun

Contemporary reinforcement learning with verifiable reward methods post-train language models on multi-step reasoning by assigning a single outcome reward uniformly across all tokens in a trajectory. Such uniform assignment ignores which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Ankur Samanta , Akshayaa Magesh , Ayush Jain , Youliang Yu , Daniel Jiang , Kavosh Asadi , Kaveh Hassani , Paul Sajda , Jalaj Bhandari , Yonathan Efroni

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Siheng Li , Zhanhui Zhou , Wai Lam , Chao Yang , Chaochao Lu

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason often relies on Reinforcement Learning (RL) with task-specific verifiers. However, many real-world reasoning-intensive tasks lack verifiers, despite offering abundant expert demonstrations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Locke Cai , Ivan Provilkov

Adversarial optimization algorithms that explicitly search for flaws in agents' policies have been successfully applied to finding robust and diverse policies in multi-agent settings. However, the success of adversarial optimization has…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Niklas Lauffer , Ameesh Shah , Micah Carroll , Sanjit A. Seshia , Stuart Russell , Michael Dennis

We introduce Adversarial Policy Optimization (AdvPO), a novel solution to the pervasive issue of reward over-optimization in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) for Large Language Models (LLMs). Over-optimization occurs when a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Xiaoying Zhang , Jean-Francois Ton , Wei Shen , Hongning Wang , Yang Liu

Large language models in the past have typically relied on some form of reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to better align model responses with human preferences. However, because of oft-observed instabilities when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-15 Xiangkun Hu , Tong He , David Wipf

Learning from human preference is a paradigm used in large-scale language model (LLM) fine-tuning step to better align pretrained LLM to human preference for downstream task. In the past it uses reinforcement learning from human feedback…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Shiming Xie , Hong Chen , Fred Yu , Zeye Sun , Xiuyu Wu , Yingfan Hu

Self-supervised reinforcement learning (RL) presents a promising approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) without reliance on expensive human-annotated data. However, we find that existing methods…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Bizhe Bai , Hongming Wu , Peng Ye , Tao Chen

The advantage function is a central concept in RL that helps reduce variance in policy gradient estimates. For language modeling, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) was proposed to use the within-group sample mean as a baseline for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Hu Wang , Congbo Ma , Ian Reid , Mohammad Yaqub

Aligning large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific data remains a fundamental challenge. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) offers a straightforward way to inject domain knowledge but often degrades the model's generality. In contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Linxuan Xia , Xiaolong Yang , Yongyuan Chen , Enyue Zhao , Deng Cai , Yasheng Wang , Boxi Wu

In the post-training of large language models (LLMs), Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is an effective approach to achieve generation aligned with human preferences. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) allows for policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Motoki Omura , Yasuhiro Fujita , Toshiki Kataoka

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated notable success in enhancing the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs). However, recent studies reveal that while current RLVR methods improve sampling…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yang Xu , Kun Yao , Yiming Deng , Zheng Fang , Kai Ming Ting , Ming Pang

Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently use on-policy algorithms, such as PPO or GRPO. However, policy lag from distributed training architectures and differences between the training and inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Daniel Ritter , Owen Oertell , Bradley Guo , Jonathan Chang , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

Safety and trustworthiness are indispensable requirements for real-world applications of AI systems using large language models (LLMs). This paper formulates human value alignment as an optimization problem of the language model policy to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Akifumi Wachi , Thien Q. Tran , Rei Sato , Takumi Tanabe , Youhei Akimoto

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a reliable approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. Among the plethora of RLHF techniques, proximal policy optimization (PPO) is of the most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Banghua Zhu , Hiteshi Sharma , Felipe Vieira Frujeri , Shi Dong , Chenguang Zhu , Michael I. Jordan , Jiantao Jiao