English
Related papers

Related papers: Learning Without Critics? Revisiting GRPO in Class…

200 papers

Recent advances in Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated their promising general capabilities. However, their performance in specialized real-world domains often degrades due to challenges in effectively integrating external…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yuzheng Cai , Siqi Cai , Yuchen Shi , Zihan Xu , Lichao Chen , Yulei Qin , Xiaoyu Tan , Gang Li , Zongyi Li , Haojia Lin , Yong Mao , Ke Li , Xing Sun

As language models become increasingly capable, users expect them to provide not only accurate responses but also behaviors aligned with diverse human preferences across a variety of scenarios. To achieve this, Reinforcement learning (RL)…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Xiangxiang Chu , Hailang Huang , Xiao Zhang , Fei Wei , Yong Wang

Group-relative policy optimization methods train language models by generating multiple rollouts per prompt and normalizing rewards with a shared mean reward baseline. In resource-constrained settings where the rollout budget is small,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Youngeun Kim

Group-based reinforcement learning methods, like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), are widely used nowadays to post-train large language models. Despite their empirical success, they exhibit structural mismatches between reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Aleksandar Fontana , Marco Simoni , Giulio Rossolini , Andrea Saracino , Paolo Mori

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, dominant approaches like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) face critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Kevin Han , Yuhang Zhou , Mingze Gao , Gedi Zhou , Serena Li , Abhishek Kumar , Xiangjun Fan , Weiwei Li , Lizhu Zhang

Reinforcement learning has been widely applied to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models. Extending the inference limits of smaller models has become a prominent research focus. However, algorithms such as Group…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Hao Wu , Wei Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), especially in scenarios where supervised fine-tuning (SFT) falls short due to limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Jian Xiong , Jingbo Zhou , Jingyong Ye , Qiang Huang , Dejing Dou

Reinforcement learning substantially improves pretrained language models, but it remains understudied why critic-free methods such as PPO and GRPO work as well as they do, and when they should provide the largest gains. We develop a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Arip Asadulaev , Daniil Ognev , Karim Salta , Martin Takac

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has been a key driver of recent progress in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models, but it is typically trained in a low-staleness, near-on-policy regime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Minghao Tian , Yunfei Xie , Chen Wei

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''…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Xichen Zhang , Sitong Wu , Yinghao Zhu , Haoru Tan , Shaozuo Yu , Ziyi He , Jiaya Jia

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), due to the deterministic verification, becomes a dominant paradigm for enhancing the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). The community witnesses the rapid change from the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Mingwei Xu , Hao Fang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven effective in strengthening the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). A widely adopted method, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has shown strong empirical results in training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Peter Chen , Xiaopeng Li , Ziniu Li , Xi Chen , Tianyi Lin

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) using numerical rewards have significantly enhanced the complex reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, we identify three fundamental limitations of purely numerical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Xiaoying Zhang , Yipeng Zhang , Hao Sun , Kaituo Feng , Chaochao Lu , Chao Yang , Helen Meng

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a popular algorithm for reinforcement learning with large language models (LLMs). However, upon analyzing its clipping mechanism, we argue that it is suboptimal in certain scenarios.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Chi Liu , Xin Chen

Policy optimization for large language models often suffers from sparse reward signals in multi-step reasoning tasks. Critic-free methods like GRPO assign a single normalized outcome reward to all tokens, providing limited guidance for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Ruiyi Ding , Yongxuan Lv , Xianhui Meng , Jiahe Song , Chao Wang , Chen Jiang , Yuan Cheng

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in solving complex mathematical problems, yet they still fall short of producing accurate and consistent solutions. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a framework for aligning these models with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ali Hatamizadeh , Shrimai Prabhumoye , Igor Gitman , Ximing Lu , Seungju Han , Wei Ping , Yejin Choi , Jan Kautz

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

Despite their sophisticated general-purpose capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail to align with diverse individual preferences because standard post-training methods, like Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF),…

While Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a scalable framework for critic-free policy learning, extending it to settings with explicit behavioral constraints remains underexplored. We introduce Constrained GRPO, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Roger Girgis , Rodrigue de Schaetzen , Luke Rowe , Azalée Robitaille , Christopher Pal , Liam Paull