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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

A significant portion of recent research on Large Language Model (LLM) alignment focuses on developing new policy optimization methods based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Two prominent directions have emerged: (i) a shift…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Svetlana Glazyrina , Maksim Kryzhanovskiy , Roman Ischenko

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 (RL) plays an increasingly important role in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet stable and performant policy optimization remains challenging. Token-level importance ratios often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Chang Gao , Chujie Zheng , Xiong-Hui Chen , Kai Dang , Shixuan Liu , Bowen Yu , An Yang , Shuai Bai , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

Reinforcement learning algorithms are fundamental to align large language models with human preferences and to enhance their reasoning capabilities. However, current reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from training instability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Yaru Hao , Li Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Zewen Chi , Furu Wei

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

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) refers to the problem of learning policies entirely from a large batch of previously collected data. This problem setting offers the promise of utilizing such datasets to acquire policies without any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Tianhe Yu , Garrett Thomas , Lantao Yu , Stefano Ermon , James Zou , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn , Tengyu Ma

We propose Soft Preference Optimization (SPO), a method for aligning generative models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), with human preferences, without the need for a reward model. SPO optimizes model outputs directly over a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Arsalan Sharifnassab , Saber Salehkaleybar , Sina Ghiassian , Surya Kanoria , Dale Schuurmans

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

Leveraging planning during learning and decision-making is central to the long-term development of intelligent agents. Recent works have successfully combined tree-based search methods and self-play learning mechanisms to this end. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Matthew V Macfarlane , Edan Toledo , Donal Byrne , Paul Duckworth , Alexandre Laterre

A fundamental challenge in model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) lies in the trade-off between generalization and robustness against exploitation errors in out-of-distribution (OOD) regions. While OOD samples may capture valid…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Hongqiang Lin , Dongxu Zhang , Yiding Sun , Mingzhe Li , Ning Yang , Haijun Zhang

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is central to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) in reasoning tasks with verifiable rewards. However, standard token-level PPO struggles in this setting due to the instability of temporal credit…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Tianyi Wang , Yixia Li , Long Li , Yibiao Chen , Shaohan Huang , Yun Chen , Peng Li , Yang Liu , Guanhua Chen

Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models effectively using reinforcement learning (RL) remains a crucial challenge. Existing approaches primarily adopt two contrasting advantage estimation granularities: token-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Yiran Guo , Lijie Xu , Jie Liu , Dan Ye , Shuang Qiu

Off-policy updates are inevitable in reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) due to rollout staleness from asynchronous training and mismatches between training and inference engines. Naive importance sampling gives an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Guobin Shen , Chenxiao Zhao , Xiang Cheng , Lei Huang , Xing Yu

Single-trajectory reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim to optimize policies from datasets consisting of (prompt, response, reward) triplets, where scalar rewards are directly available. This supervision format is highly practical, as it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Bilal Faye , Hanane Azzag , Mustapha Lebbah

Post-training language models (LMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) can enhance their complex reasoning capabilities without supervised fine-tuning, as demonstrated by DeepSeek-R1-Zero. However, effectively utilizing RL for LMs requires…

Improving the alignment of language models with human preferences remains an active research challenge. Previous approaches have primarily utilized Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) via online RL methods such as Proximal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-25 Tianqi Liu , Yao Zhao , Rishabh Joshi , Misha Khalman , Mohammad Saleh , Peter J. Liu , Jialu Liu

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a popular model-free reinforcement learning algorithm, esteemed for its simplicity and efficacy. However, due to its inherent on-policy nature, its proficiency in harnessing data from disparate policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Yaozhong Gan , Renye Yan , Xiaoyang Tan , Zhe Wu , Junliang Xing

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to improve complex reasoning abilities. However, state-of-the-art policy optimization methods often suffer from high computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Kianté Brantley , Mingyu Chen , Zhaolin Gao , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun , Wenhao Zhan , Xuezhou Zhang

Traditional language model alignment methods, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), are limited by their dependence on static, pre-collected paired preference data, which hampers their adaptability and practical applicability. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Yueqin Yin , Zhendong Wang , Yujia Xie , Weizhu Chen , Mingyuan Zhou
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