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It is challenging for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to succeed in real-world applications like financial trading and logistic system due to the noisy observation and environment shifting between training and evaluation. Thus, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Zhengyu Yang , Kan Ren , Xufang Luo , Minghuan Liu , Weiqing Liu , Jiang Bian , Weinan Zhang , Dongsheng Li

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, prevailing RLVR methods exhibit a systematic bias toward exploitation over exploration, as evidenced by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Ruotian Peng , Yi Ren , Zhouliang Yu , Weiyang Liu , Yandong Wen

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs), but the widely used Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) often suffers from entropy collapse: exploration quickly disappears, policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Chen Wang , Zhaochun Li , Jionghao Bai , Hexuan Deng , Ge Lan , Yue Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central component of post-training for large language models (LLMs), particularly for complex reasoning tasks that require stable optimization over long generation horizons. However, achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yuepeng Sheng , Yuwei Huang , Shuman Liu , Anxiang Zeng , Haibo Zhang

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a central tool for language model alignment. We consider online exploration in RLHF, which exploits interactive access to human or AI feedback by deliberately encouraging the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Tengyang Xie , Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Corby Rosset , Ahmed Awadallah , Alexander Rakhlin

Optimizing policies based on human preferences is key to aligning language models with human intent. This work focuses on reward modeling, a core component in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), and offline preference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Soichiro Nishimori , Yu-Jie Zhang , Thanawat Lodkaew , Masashi Sugiyama

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO) are important techniques to align large language models (LLM) with human preference. However, the quality of RLHF and DPO training is seriously…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Ziyi Chen , Junyi Li , Peiran Yu , Heng Huang

We address the challenge of exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) when the agent operates in an unknown environment with sparse or no rewards. In this work, we study the maximum entropy exploration problem of two different types. The…

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel in robotic manipulation but are constrained by their heavy reliance on expert demonstrations, leading to demonstration bias and limiting performance. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a vital…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Senyu Fei , Siyin Wang , Li Ji , Ao Li , Shiduo Zhang , Liming Liu , Jinlong Hou , Jingjing Gong , Xianzhong Zhao , Xipeng Qiu

Large language models (LLMs) have recently advanced in reasoning when optimized with reinforcement learning (RL) under verifiable rewards. Existing methods primarily rely on outcome-based supervision to strengthen internal LLM reasoning,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Siyao Song , Cong Ma , Zhihao Cheng , Shiye Lei , Minghao Li , Ying Zeng , Huaixiao Tou , Kai Jia

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants have become standard for aligning Large Language Models due to their simplicity and offline stability. However, we identify two fundamental limitations. First, the optimal policy depends…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yu Li , Tian Lan , Zhengling Qi

Blind Face Restoration (BFR) encounters inherent challenges in exploring its large solution space, leading to common artifacts like missing details and identity ambiguity in the restored images. To tackle these challenges, we propose a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Bin Wu , Yahui Liu , Chi Zhang , Yao Zhao , Wei Wang

Entropy minimization (EM) trains the model to concentrate even more probability mass on its most confident outputs. We show that this simple objective alone, without any labeled data, can substantially improve large language models' (LLMs)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Shivam Agarwal , Zimin Zhang , Lifan Yuan , Jiawei Han , Hao Peng

We investigate an entropy-regularized reinforcement learning (RL) approach to optimal stopping problems motivated by real option models. Classical stopping rules are strict and non-randomized, limiting natural exploration in RL settings. To…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-18 Jodi Dianetti , Giorgio Ferrari , Renyuan Xu

In the classical Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) framework, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is employed to learn from sparse, sentence-level rewards -- a challenging scenario in traditional deep reinforcement learning.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Han Zhong , Zikang Shan , Guhao Feng , Wei Xiong , Xinle Cheng , Li Zhao , Di He , Jiang Bian , Liwei Wang

Software engineering presents complex, multi-step challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs), requiring reasoning over large codebases and coordinated tool use. The difficulty of these tasks is exemplified by benchmarks like SWE-bench,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Jiahao Yu , Zelei Cheng , Xian Wu , Xinyu Xing

Recent advances in large reasoning models have leveraged reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to improve reasoning capabilities. However, scaling these methods typically requires extensive rollout computation and large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Xinyu Tang , Zhenduo Zhang , Yurou Liu , Wayne Xin Zhao , Zujie Wen , Zhiqiang Zhang , Jun Zhou

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values is an increasingly critical step in post-training. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a simple, yet effective alternative to reinforcement learning from human feedback…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Yifan Wang , Runjin Chen , Bolian Li , David Cho , Yihe Deng , Ruqi Zhang , Tianlong Chen , Zhangyang Wang , Ananth Grama , Junyuan Hong

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for deploying RL agents in real-world applications, as it aims to maximize long-term rewards while satisfying safety constraints. However, safe RL often suffers from sample inefficiency, requiring…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Shangding Gu , Laixi Shi , Yuhao Ding , Alois Knoll , Costas Spanos , Adam Wierman , Ming Jin

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