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Large reasoning models (LRMs) are typically trained using reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) to enhance their reasoning abilities. In this paradigm, policies are updated using both positive and negative self-generated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Xinyu Tang , Yuliang Zhan , Zhixun Li , Wayne Xin Zhao , Zhenduo Zhang , Zujie Wen , Zhiqiang Zhang , Jun Zhou

Preference alignment is pivotal for empowering large language models (LLMs) to generate helpful and harmless responses. However, the performance of preference alignment is highly sensitive to the prevalent noise in the preference data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Xize Liang , Chao Chen , Shuang Qiu , Jie Wang , Yue Wu , Zhihang Fu , Zhihao Shi , Feng Wu , Jieping Ye

Self-play alignment has emerged as an effective approach for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), formulating preference optimization as a two-player game. However, the regularization with respect to the reference policy, which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Xiaohang Tang , Sangwoong Yoon , Seongho Son , Huizhuo Yuan , Quanquan Gu , Ilija Bogunovic

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a prevailing approach for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. Among recent methods, GRPO stands out for its empirical success in training models such as DeepSeek-R1,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Wei Xiong , Jiarui Yao , Yuhui Xu , Bo Pang , Lei Wang , Doyen Sahoo , Junnan Li , Nan Jiang , Tong Zhang , Caiming Xiong , Hanze Dong

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

The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) utilizes Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) for non-verifiable domains such as long-form question answering and open-ended instruction following. These domains often rely on LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Nirmal Patel , Fei Wang , Inderjit S. Dhillon

Direct Alignment Algorithms (DAAs) such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have emerged as alternatives to the standard Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Phuc Minh Nguyen , Ngoc-Hieu Nguyen , Duy H. M. Nguyen , Anji Liu , An Mai , Binh T. Nguyen , Daniel Sonntag , Khoa D. Doan

Extending large language models (LLMs) to low-resource languages often incurs an "alignment tax": improvements in the target language come at the cost of catastrophic forgetting in general capabilities. We argue that this trade-off arises…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Zeli Su , Ziyin Zhang , Zhou Liu , Xuexian Song , Zhankai Xu , Longfei Zheng , Xiaolu Zhang , Rong Fu , Guixian Xu , Wentao Zhang

Tool-based Agentic Reinforcement Learning (TARL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for training search agents to interact with external tools for a multi-turn information-seeking process autonomously. However, we identify a critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Jian Li , Dongsheng Chen , Zhenhua Xu , Yizhang Jin , Jiafu Wu , Chengjie Wang , Xiaotong Yuan , Yabiao Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model reasoning is frequently hindered by signal loss, a phenomenon where standard uniform sampling with small group sizes fails to uncover informative learning signals for difficult prompts.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Wei Xiong , Chenlu Ye , Baohao Liao , Hanze Dong , Xinxing Xu , Christof Monz , Jiang Bian , Nan Jiang , Tong Zhang

Autoregressive (AR) models are highly effective for image generation, yet their standard maximum-likelihood estimation training lacks direct optimization for sample quality and diversity. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Orhun Buğra Baran , Melih Kandemir , Ramazan Gokberk Cinbis

Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a key technique for training large reasoning models, yet it suffers from a critical vulnerability: the \emph{Think-Answer Mismatch}, where noisy reward signals corrupt the learning process. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Si Shen , Peijun Shen , Wenhua Zhao , Danhao Zhu

Most recent RL for LLMs (RL4LLM) methods avoid explicit critics, replacing them with average advantage baselines. This shift is largely pragmatic: conventional value functions are computationally expensive to train at LLM scale and often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Jiashun Liu , Johan Obando-Ceron , Han Lu , Yancheng He , Weixun Wang , Wenbo Su , Bo Zheng , Pablo Samuel Castro , Aaron Courville , Ling Pan

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

Asynchronous reinforcement learning has become increasingly central to scaling LLM post-training, delivering major throughput gains by decoupling rollout generation from policy updates. However, widely used policy-gradient objectives such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Luke J. Huang , Zhuoyang Zhang , Qinghao Hu , Shang Yang , Song Han

The rapid development of large language model (LLM) alignment algorithms has resulted in a complex and fragmented landscape, with limited clarity on the effectiveness of different methods and their inter-connections. This paper introduces…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown extraordinary potential in aligning diffusion models to downstream tasks, yet most of them still suffer from significant reward hacking, which degrades generative diversity and quality by inducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Jiaming Li , Chenyu Zhu , Nanxi Yi , Youjun Bao , Li Sun , Quanying Lv , Xiang Fang , Daizong Liu , Jianjun Li , Kun He , Bowen Zhou , Zhiyuan Ma

Despite the efficacy of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), reward hacking remains a pivotal challenge. This issue emerges when LLMs excessively reduce the probability of rejected completions to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Chenxu Yang , Ruipeng Jia , Mingyu Zheng , Naibin Gu , Zheng Lin , Siyuan Chen , Weichong Yin , Hua Wu , Weiping Wang

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a prominent paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the entropy of LLMs usually collapses during RLVR training, leading…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Renren Jin , Pengzhi Gao , Yuqi Ren , Zhuowen Han , Tongxuan Zhang , Wuwei Huang , Wei Liu , Jian Luan , Deyi Xiong

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a key paradigm for aligning and optimizing large language models (LLMs). Standard approaches treat the LLM as the policy and apply RL directly over the full vocabulary space. However, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Jing-Cheng Pang , Liang Lu , Xian Tang , Kun Jiang , Sijie Wu , Kai Zhang , Xubin Li