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The Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a reinforcement learning method used to fine-tune large language models (LLMs), has proved its effectiveness in practical applications such as DeepSeek-R1. It raises a question whether GRPO can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Yanchen Xu , Ziheng Jiao , Hongyuan Zhang , Xuelong Li

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate accurate and reliable responses that are grounded in retrieved context. However, LLMs often generate inconsistent outputs for semantically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Xujun Peng , Anoop Kumar , Jingyu Wu , Parker Glenn , Daben Liu

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from static data but often suffers from poor coverage of the state-action space and distributional shift problems. This problem can be addressed by allowing limited online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Soumyadeep Roy , Shashwat Kushwaha , Ambedkar Dukkipati

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the predominant method for adapting large language models (LLMs), yet it often struggles with generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). In this work, we posit that this performance disparity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Rui Ming , Haoyuan Wu , Shoubo Hu , Zhuolun He , Bei Yu

This paper proposes a novel formulation for reinforcement learning (RL) with large language models, explaining why and under what conditions the true sequence-level reward can be optimized via a surrogate token-level objective in policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Chujie Zheng , Kai Dang , Bowen Yu , Mingze Li , Huiqiang Jiang , Junrong Lin , Yuqiong Liu , Hao Lin , Chencan Wu , Feng Hu , An Yang , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

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

Reinforcement Learning (RL) can directly enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models without extensive reliance on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this work, we revisit the traditional Policy Gradient (PG) mechanism and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Xiangxiang Chu , Hailang Huang , Xiao Zhang , Fei Wei , Yong Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is emerging as a powerful paradigm for enabling large language models (LLMs) to perform complex reasoning tasks. Recent advances indicate that integrating RL with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) allows LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Wentao Jiang , Xiang Feng , Zengmao Wang , Yong Luo , Pingbo Xu , Zhe Chen , Bo Du , Jing Zhang

Large-scale reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated its effectiveness in harnessing the potential of large language models (LLMs) for single-turn reasoning tasks. In realistic reasoning scenarios, LLMs can…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) allows for the training of competent agents from offline datasets without any interaction with the environment. Online finetuning of such offline models can further improve performance. But how should we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-31 Yicheng Luo , Jackie Kay , Edward Grefenstette , Marc Peter Deisenroth

Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Daoming Lyu , Qi Qi , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Hengshuai Yao , Tianbao Yang , Bo Liu

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a promising critic-free reinforcement learning paradigm for reasoning tasks. However, standard GRPO employs a coarse-grained credit assignment mechanism that propagates group-level…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Ziheng Li , Liu Kang , Feng Xiao , Luxi Xing , Qingyi Si , Zhuoran Li , Weikang Gong , Deqing Yang , Yanghua Xiao , Hongcheng Guo

Alignment methodologies have emerged as a critical pathway for enhancing language model alignment capabilities. While SFT (supervised fine-tuning) accelerates convergence through direct token-level loss intervention, its efficacy is…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to solve the problem of finding obstacle-free paths for autonomous agents operating in stochastic and uncertain environments. However, when the underlying stochastic dynamics of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Sheryl Paul , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

While originally developed for continuous control problems, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has emerged as the work-horse of a variety of reinforcement learning (RL) applications, including the fine-tuning of generative models.…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) optimizes the policy on a previously collected dataset without any interactions with the environment, yet usually suffers from the distributional shift problem. To mitigate this issue, a typical solution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Qisen Yang , Shenzhi Wang , Qihang Zhang , Gao Huang , Shiji Song

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

This paper provides a self-contained, from-scratch, exposition of key algorithms for instruction tuning of models: SFT, Rejection Sampling, REINFORCE, Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), Group…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Rohit Patel

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has been a key driver of recent progress in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models, but it is typically trained in a low-staleness, near-on-policy regime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Minghao Tian , Yunfei Xie , Chen Wei

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms update an agent's parameters according to one of several possible rules, discovered manually through years of research. Automating the discovery of update rules from data could lead to more efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-06 Junhyuk Oh , Matteo Hessel , Wojciech M. Czarnecki , Zhongwen Xu , Hado van Hasselt , Satinder Singh , David Silver