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Aligning large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific data remains a fundamental challenge. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) offers a straightforward way to inject domain knowledge but often degrades the model's generality. In contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Linxuan Xia , Xiaolong Yang , Yongyuan Chen , Enyue Zhao , Deng Cai , Yasheng Wang , Boxi Wu

Large language models are commonly trained through multi-stage post-training: first via RLHF, then fine-tuned for other downstream objectives. Yet even small downstream updates can compromise earlier learned behaviors (e.g., safety),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Mahdi Sabbaghi , George Pappas , Adel Javanmard , Hamed Hassani

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms such as PPO and GRPO are widely used to train large language models (LLMs) for multi-turn agentic tasks. However, in off-policy training pipelines, these methods often exhibit unstable optimization…

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities through large-scale pretraining and post-training reinforcement learning, demonstrated by DeepSeek-R1. However, current post-training methods, such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Boyang Gu , Hongjian Zhou , Bradley Max Segal , Jinge Wu , Zeyu Cao , Hantao Zhong , Lei Clifton , Fenglin Liu , David A. Clifton

While reinforcement learning (RL) has been central to the recent success of large language models (LLMs), RL optimization is notoriously unstable, especially when compared to supervised fine-tuning (SFT). In this work, we investigate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Hongzhan Chen , Tao Yang , Yuhua Zhu , Shiping Gao , Xiaojun Quan , Ting Yao

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are powerful at integrating diverse data, but they often struggle with complex reasoning. While Reinforcement learning (RL) can boost reasoning in LLMs, applying it to MLLMs is tricky. Common issues…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Minjie Hong , Zirun Guo , Yan Xia , Zehan Wang , Ziang Zhang , Tao Jin , Zhou Zhao

Recent advancements in post-training methodologies for large language models (LLMs) have highlighted reinforcement learning (RL) as a critical component for enhancing reasoning. However, the substantial computational costs associated with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Songjun Tu , Jiahao Lin , Xiangyu Tian , Qichao Zhang , Linjing Li , Yuqian Fu , Nan Xu , Wei He , Xiangyuan Lan , Dongmei Jiang , Dongbin Zhao

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has catalyzed a leap in Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, yet its optimization dynamics remain fragile. Standard algorithms like GRPO enforce stability via "hard clipping", which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Xiaoliang Fu , Jiaye Lin , Yangyi Fang , Chaowen Hu , Cong Qin , Zekai Shao , Binbin Zheng , Lu Pan , Ke Zeng

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in sequential decision tasks. However, recent studies have revealed the vulnerability of RL policies to different perturbations, raising concerns about their effectiveness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Buqing Nie , Yangqing Fu , Jingtian Ji , Yue Gao

Instruction-fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) under 14B parameters continue to underperform on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, often trailing smaller models like BERT-base on benchmarks such as GLUE and SuperGLUE.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Bokai Hu , Sai Ashish Somayajula , Xin Pan , Pengtao Xie

The proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm stands as one of the most prosperous methods in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). Despite its success, the theoretical understanding of PPO remains deficient. Specifically, it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Han Zhong , Tong Zhang

Reinforcement learning algorithms such as group-relative policy optimization (GRPO) have shown strong potential for improving the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models. While a growing body of work seeks to improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Wenquan Lu , Hai Huang , Enqi Liu , Randall Balestriero

We present trust region bounds for optimizing decentralized policies in cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), which holds even when the transition dynamics are non-stationary. This new analysis provides a theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-16 Mingfei Sun , Sam Devlin , Jacob Beck , Katja Hofmann , Shimon Whiteson

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

Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) seeks to learn policies that balance multiple, often conflicting objectives. Although a single preference-conditioned policy is the most flexible and scalable solution, existing approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Tanmay Ambadkar , Sourav Panda , Shreyash Kale , Jonathan Dodge , Abhinav Verma

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has revolutionized language modeling by aligning models with human preferences. However, the RL stage, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), requires over 3x the memory of Supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Michael Santacroce , Yadong Lu , Han Yu , Yuanzhi Li , Yelong Shen

Improving and understanding the training dynamics and reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become essential for their deployment in AI-based security tools, such as software vulnerability detection. In this work, we present an…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Marco Simoni , Aleksandar Fontana , Giulio Rossolini , Andrea Saracino

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have high sample complexity while off-policy algorithms are difficult to tune. Merging the two holds the promise to develop efficient algorithms that generalize across diverse environments.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-17 Rasool Fakoor , Pratik Chaudhari , Alexander J. Smola

Multi-agent proximal policy optimization (MAPPO) has recently demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on challenging multi-agent reinforcement learning tasks. However, MAPPO still struggles with the credit assignment problem, wherein the…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Aditya Kapoor , Benjamin Freed , Howie Choset , Jeff Schneider

As large language models (LLMs) become more capable, fine-tuning techniques for aligning with human intent are increasingly important. A key consideration for aligning these models is how to most effectively use human resources, or model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-01 William Muldrew , Peter Hayes , Mingtian Zhang , David Barber