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Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has proven highly effective in enhancing the alignment capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, current adaptations of GRPO for the flow matching-based image generation neglect a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Yawen Shao , Jie Xiao , Kai Zhu , Yu Liu , Wei Zhai , Yang Cao , Zheng-Jun Zha

The enhancement of reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs) has garnered significant attention, with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning emerging as dominant paradigms. While recent studies recognize the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Zhijie Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is pivotal for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, yet mainstream algorithms such as GRPO and DAPO remain constrained by a coarse-grained credit assignment paradigm, where all tokens within the same…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Hongze Tan , Zihan Wang , Jianfei Pan , Jinghao Lin , Hao Wang , Yifan Wu , Tao Chen , Zhihang Zheng , Zhihao Tang , Haihua Yang

While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Rafael Rafailov , Archit Sharma , Eric Mitchell , Stefano Ermon , Christopher D. Manning , Chelsea Finn

Aligning human preference and value is an important requirement for building contemporary foundation models and embodied AI. However, popular approaches such as reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) break down the task into…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Chenliang Li , Siliang Zeng , Zeyi Liao , Jiaxiang Li , Dongyeop Kang , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a powerful algorithm for improving the reasoning capabilities of language models, but often fails to improve small models due to sparse rewards on difficult tasks. Existing works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Soo Min Kwon , Ziteng Sun , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Himanshu Jain , Sanjiv Kumar

Policy optimization for large language models often suffers from sparse reward signals in multi-step reasoning tasks. Critic-free methods like GRPO assign a single normalized outcome reward to all tokens, providing limited guidance for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Ruiyi Ding , Yongxuan Lv , Xianhui Meng , Jiahe Song , Chao Wang , Chen Jiang , Yuan Cheng

We show that several popular algorithms for reinforcement learning in large language models with binary rewards can be viewed as stochastic gradient ascent on a monotone transform of the probability of a correct answer given a prompt. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Damek Davis , Benjamin Recht

Aligning intelligent agents with human preferences and values is important. This paper examines two popular alignment methods: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Reward-Model-Based Policy Optimization (RMB-PO). A variant of RMB-PO,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Ziniu Li , Tian Xu , Yang Yu

Large language models (LLMs), despite their extensive pretraining on diverse datasets, require effective alignment to human preferences for practical and reliable deployment. Conventional alignment methods typically employ off-policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Hyeonji Lee , Daejin Jo , Seohwan Yun , Sungwoong Kim

RLVR has become a widely adopted paradigm for improving LLMs' reasoning capabilities, and GRPO is one of its most representative algorithms. In this paper, we first show that GRPO admits an equivalent discriminative reformulation as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Feng Zhang , Xinhong Ma , Ziqiang Dong , Xi Leng , Jianfei Zhao , Xin Sun , Yang Yang , Guanjun Jiang

Recently, there has been significant interest in replacing the reward model in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) methods for Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants. These…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Jian Li , Haojing Huang , Yujia Zhang , Pengfei Xu , Xi Chen , Rui Song , Lida Shi , Jingwen Wang , Hao Xu

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become an effective paradigm for improving reasoning language models on tasks such as mathematics, coding, and scientific question answering. However, widely used group-relative…

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

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human feedback is crucial for their development. Existing preference optimization methods such as DPO and KTO, while improved based on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Shuo Xie , Fangzhi Zhu , Jiahui Wang , Lulu Wen , Wei Dai , Xiaowei Chen , Junxiong Zhu , Kai Zhou , Bo Zheng

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

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a standard algorithm for reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards, but its group-mean-centered advantage can fail under binary rewards. The failure mode is gradient starvation: when every…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Wenhua Nie , Jianan Wu , Junlin Liu , Ziwei Li , Zheng Lin , Zhang Zijian , Yilong Fan , Haoran Zheng , Jyh-Shing Roger Jang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become popular in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) emerging as a widely used algorithm in recent systems. Despite GRPO's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Wenlong Deng , Yi Ren , Muchen Li , Danica J. Sutherland , Xiaoxiao Li , Christos Thrampoulidis

Margin-based optimization is fundamental to improving generalization and robustness in classification tasks. In the context of reward model learning from preferences within Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), existing methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Yaswanth Chittepu , Prasann Singhal , Greg Durrett , Scott Niekum

Two divergence regimes dominate modern alignment practice. Supervised fine-tuning and many distillation-style objectives implicitly minimize the forward KL divergence KL(q || pi_theta), yielding stable mode-covering updates but often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Wang Zixian

Preference optimization has become a central paradigm for aligning large language models with human feedback. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) simplifies reinforcement learning from human feedback by directly optimizing pairwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Inoussa Mouiche