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Despite the close connection between exploration and sample efficiency, most state of the art reinforcement learning algorithms include no considerations for exploration beyond maximizing the entropy of the policy. In this work we address…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an indispensable paradigm for enhancing reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, standard policy optimization methods, such as Group Relative Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Pengyi Li , Elizaveta Goncharova , Andrey Kuznetsov , Ivan Oseledets

This paper examines the exploration-exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), a framework for improving the reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent studies suggest that RLVR can elicit strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Peter Chen , Xiaopeng Li , Ziniu Li , Wotao Yin , Xi Chen , Tianyi Lin

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for post-training large language models. While Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely adopted, its coarse credit assignment uniformly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Gengsheng Li , Tianyu Yang , Junfeng Fang , Mingyang Song , Mao Zheng , Haiyun Guo , Dan Zhang , Jinqiao Wang , Tat-Seng Chua

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise as intelligent agents in interactive decision-making tasks. Traditional approaches often depend on meticulously designed prompts, high-quality examples, or additional reward models for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Muning Wen , Junwei Liao , Cheng Deng , Jun Wang , Weinan Zhang , Ying Wen

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning have been hindered by a persistent challenge: exploration collapse. The semantic homogeneity of random rollouts often traps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Huilin Deng , Hongchen Luo , Yue Zhu , Long Li , Zhuoyue Chen , Xinghao Zhao , Ming Li , Jihai Zhang , Mengchang Wang , Yang Cao , Yu Kang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities in well-defined problems with clear solutions, such as mathematics and coding. However, they still struggle with complex real-world scenarios like business…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Xiaoqian Liu , Ke Wang , Yongbin Li , Yuchuan Wu , Wentao Ma , Aobo Kong , Fei Huang , Jianbin Jiao , Junge Zhang

Reinforcement learning for large language models faces a fundamental trade-off between sample efficiency and asymptotic performance: strictly on-policy methods discard trajectories after a single update, while off-policy reuse introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Changyu Chen , Xiting Wang , Rui Yan

Reinforcement Learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a primary learning paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs). However, during RL training, the enormous state space of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Zhuoxu Huang , Mengxi Jia , Hao Sun , Xuelong Li , Jungong Han

Reinforcement learning with verifiable reward has recently emerged as a central paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs); however, prevailing mean-based methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Tao Ren , Jinyang Jiang , Hui Yang , Wan Tian , Minhao Zou , Guanghao Li , Zishi Zhang , Qinghao Wang , Shentao Qin , Yanjun Zhao , Rui Tao , Hui Shao , Yijie Peng

State-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically use random sampling (e.g., $\epsilon$-greedy) for exploration, but this method fails on hard exploration tasks like Montezuma's Revenge. To address the challenge of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Eric Chen , Zhang-Wei Hong , Joni Pajarinen , Pulkit Agrawal

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) typically assigns a uniform, sequence-level advantage to all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Song Yu , Li Li , Wenwen Zhao , Zhisheng Yang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has catalyzed significant advances in the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, effectively managing the exploration and exploitation trade-off remains a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Xiaofan Li , Ming Yang , Zhiyuan Ma , Shichao Ma , Jintao Du , Yu Cheng , Weiqiang Wang , Zhizhong Zhang , Xin Tan , Yanyun Qu , Lizhuang Ma , Yuan Xie

Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) has shown remarkable potential in large language model-based (LLM) agents. These works can empower LLM agents to tackle complex tasks via multi-step, tool-integrated reasoning. However, an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Siwei Zhang , Yun Xiong , Xi Chen , Zi'an Jia , Renhong Huang , Jiarong Xu , Jiawei Zhang

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Minjae Cho , Huy Trong Tran

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved promising results on most robotic control tasks. Safety of learning-based controllers is an essential notion of ensuring the effectiveness of the controllers. Current methods adopt whole consistency…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-31 Haotian Xu , Shengjie Wang , Zhaolei Wang , Yunzhe Zhang , Qing Zhuo , Yang Gao , Tao Zhang

Hybrid training methods for large language models combine supervised fine tuning (SFT) on expert demonstrations with reinforcement learning (RL) on model rollouts, typically at the sample level. We propose Entropy Gated Selective Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Yuelin Hu , Zhengxue Cheng , Wei Liu , Li Song

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive reasoning performance, with reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) emerging as a standard paradigm for post-training. A representative algorithm, group relative policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Yuheng Zhang , Wenlin Yao , Changlong Yu , Yao Liu , Qingyu Yin , Bing Yin , Hyokun Yun , Lihong Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) has improved the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), yet state-of-the-art methods still fail to learn on many training problems. On hard problems, on-policy RL rarely explores even a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Yuxiao Qu , Amrith Setlur , Virginia Smith , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Aviral Kumar