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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) post-training is crucial for LLM alignment and reasoning, but existing policy-based methods, such as PPO and DPO, can fall short of fixing shortcuts inherited from pre-training. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Jin Peng Zhou , Kaiwen Wang , Jonathan Chang , Zhaolin Gao , Nathan Kallus , Kilian Q. Weinberger , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

Instruction-fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) under 14B parameters continue to underperform on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, often trailing smaller models like BERT-base on benchmarks such as GLUE and SuperGLUE.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Bokai Hu , Sai Ashish Somayajula , Xin Pan , Pengtao Xie

This paper studies the alignment process of generative models with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). We first identify the primary challenges of existing popular methods like offline PPO and offline DPO as lacking in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Wei Xiong , Hanze Dong , Chenlu Ye , Ziqi Wang , Han Zhong , Heng Ji , Nan Jiang , Tong 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

In this paper, we tackle the challenging problem of delayed rewards in reinforcement learning (RL). While Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has emerged as a leading Policy Gradient method, its performance can degrade under delayed rewards.…

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has been positioned by recent literature as the canonical method for the RL part of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). PPO performs well empirically but has a heuristic motivation and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Dipan Maity

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-15 Jinyang Jiang , Jiaqiao Hu , Yijie Peng

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

This paper introduces a reinforcement learning framework that employs Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to dynamically optimize the weights of multiple large language model (LLM)-generated formulaic alphas for stock trading strategies.…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Qizhao Chen , Hiroaki Kawashima

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most successful deep reinforcement-learning methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of challenging tasks. However, its optimization behavior is still far from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-15 Yuhui Wang , Hao He , Chao Wen , Xiaoyang Tan

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely used for critic-free Large Language Model (LLM) post-training, but its KL regularization is usually implemented as a local loss-side token penalty. We show that this misses the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jiarui Yao , Ruida Wang , Hao Bai , Tong Zhang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) plays a crucial role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and preferences. However, the quality and stability of the trained reward model largely determine the final…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Chunjin Jian , Xinhua Zhu

Contrastive reinforcement learning (CRL) learns goal-conditioned Q-values through a contrastive objective over state-action and goal representations, removing the need for hand-crafted reward functions. Despite impressive success in…

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are among the most successful policy gradient approaches in deep reinforcement learning (RL). While these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ahmed Touati , Amy Zhang , Joelle Pineau , Pascal Vincent

Standard reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) trains a reward model on pairwise preference data and then uses it for policy optimization. However, while reward models are optimized to capture relative preferences, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Kyuseong Choi , Dwaipayan Saha , Woojeong Kim , Anish Agarwal , Raaz Dwivedi

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly popular due to their ability to process and generate natural language. However, as they are trained on massive datasets of text, LLMs can inherit harmful biases and produce outputs that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Qi Gou , Cam-Tu Nguyen

To design rewards that align with human goals, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a prominent technique for learning reward functions from human preferences and optimizing policies via reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Taehyun Cho , Seokhun Ju , Seungyub Han , Dohyeong Kim , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)-based reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a widely adopted paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, its training pipeline suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Kaizhuo Yan , Yingjie Yu , Yifan Yu , Haizhong Zheng , Fan Lai

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms often require a large amount of data and struggle in sparse-reward domains with long planning horizons and multiple sub-goals. In this paper, we propose a neuro-symbolic extension of Proximal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Simone Murari , Celeste Veronese , Daniele Meli