Related papers: SPG: Sandwiched Policy Gradient for Masked Diffusi…

Large Language Models (LLMs) show potential as sequential decision-making agents, but their application is often limited due to a reliance on large, computationally expensive models. This creates a need to improve smaller models, yet…

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) is a recent reinforcement learning framework whose success has been supported by various empirical studies. It relies on the key idea of replacing the expected return with the return distribution,…

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…

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these methods are fundamentally constrained by the ''learning cliff''…

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) introduce a new paradigm for language generation, which in turn presents new challenges for aligning them with human preferences. In this work, we aim to improve the policy optimization for dLLMs by…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is about sequential decision making and is traditionally opposed to supervised learning (SL) and unsupervised learning (USL). In RL, given the current state, the agent makes a decision that may influence the next…

Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential in sequential decision-making. At present, mainstream RL algorithms are data-driven, which usually yield better asymptotic performance but much slower convergence compared with model-driven…

What are the limits of controlling language models via synthetic training data? We develop a reinforcement learning (RL) primitive, the Dataset Policy Gradient (DPG), which can precisely optimize synthetic data generators to produce a…

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…

In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods…

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are promising alternatives to autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), as they potentially allow higher inference throughput. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a crucial component for dLLMs to…

Improving the reasoning capabilities of diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) through reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open problem. The intractability of dLLMs likelihood function necessitates approximating the current, old,…

Post-training processes are essential phases in grounding pre-trained language models to real-world tasks, with learning from demonstrations or preference signals playing a crucial role in this adaptation. We present a unified theoretical…

Policy gradient (PG) methods have played an essential role in the empirical successes of reinforcement learning. In order to handle large state-action spaces, PG methods are typically used with function approximation. In this setting, the…

We propose DiFFPO, Diffusion Fast and Furious Policy Optimization, a unified framework for training masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs) to reason not only better (furious), but also faster via reinforcement learning (RL). We…

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as promising alternatives to autoregressive (AR) LLMs. Recently, this paradigm has been extended to multimodal tasks, leading to the development of diffusion multimodal large language…

We propose a metalearning approach for learning gradient-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. The idea is to evolve a differentiable loss function, such that an agent, which optimizes its policy to minimize this loss, will achieve…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), encounter the challenge of distribution shift. Current approaches typically address this issue…

Discrete diffusion models have recently gained significant attention due to their ability to process complex discrete structures for language modeling. However, fine-tuning these models with policy gradient methods, as is commonly done in…

The theory of continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) has progressed rapidly in recent years. While the ultimate objective of RL is typically to learn deterministic control policies, most existing continuous-time RL methods rely on…