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Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become the dominant method for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards in large language models, but it suffers from two critical limitations: gradient vanishing and diversity collapse.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Khiem Le , Phuc Nguyen , Youssef Mroueh , Chi-Heng Lin , Shangqian Gao , Ting Hua , Nitesh V. Chawla

Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems often have access to sparse rewards where the agent receives a reward signal only when it has achieved the goal, making policy optimization a difficult problem. Several works augment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Siddhant Agarwal , Ishan Durugkar , Peter Stone , Amy Zhang

Categorical variables are a natural choice for representing discrete structure in the world. However, stochastic neural networks rarely use categorical latent variables due to the inability to backpropagate through samples. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-08-08 Eric Jang , Shixiang Gu , Ben Poole

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is an essential paradigm that enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods typically rely on static policy optimization schemes that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yiming Huang , Zhenbo Shi , Shuzheng Gao , Cuiyun Gao , Peiyi Han , Chuanyi Liu

To overcome the sparse reward challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) for agents based on large language models (LLMs), we propose Mutual Information Self-Evaluation (MISE), an RL paradigm that utilizes hindsight generative self-evaluation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Jiashu Yao , Heyan Huang , Zeming Liu , Yuhang Guo

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown exceptional performance across various applications, enabling autonomous agents to learn optimal policies through interaction with their environments. However, traditional RL frameworks often face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Rui Liu , Anish Gupta , Erfaun Noorani , Pratap Tokekar

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), which uses simple binary feedback to post-train large language models, has found significant empirical success. However, a principled understanding of why it works is lacking. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Joe Suk , Yaqi Duan

Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as an efficient paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its efficacy is primarily confined to domains with verifiable ground truths. Extending GRPO to open-domain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Yang Zhao , Hepeng Wang , Xiao Ding , Yangou Ouyang , Bibo Cai , Kai Xiong , Jinglong Gao , Zhouhao Sun , Li Du , Bing Qin , Ting Liu

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) bypasses complex reward engineering by learning rewards directly from human preferences, enabling better alignment with human intentions. However, its effectiveness in multi-stage tasks, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yao Luan , Ni Mu , Yiqin Yang , Bo Xu , Qing-Shan Jia

We propose FlowRL: matching the full reward distribution via flow balancing instead of maximizing rewards in large language model (LLM) reinforcement learning (RL). Recent advanced reasoning models adopt reward-maximizing methods (\eg, PPO…

Personalized alignment of large language models seeks to adapt responses to individual user preferences, typically via reinforcement learning. A key challenge is obtaining accurate, user-specific reward signals in open-ended scenarios.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Pinyi Zhang , Ting-En Lin , Yuchuan Wu , Jingyang Chen , Zongqi Wang , Hua Yang , Ze Xu , Fei Huang , Kai Zhang , Yongbin Li

Inverse Reinforcement Learning aims to recover reward models from expert demonstrations, but traditional methods yield black-box models that are difficult to interpret and debug. In this work, we introduce GRACE (Generating Rewards As…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Silvia Sapora , Devon Hjelm , Alexander Toshev , Omar Attia , Bogdan Mazoure

Optimizing communication topology is fundamental to the efficiency and effectiveness of Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). While recent approaches utilize reinforcement learning to dynamically construct…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Yueyang Cang , Xiaoteng Zhang , Erlu Zhao , Zehua Ji , Yuhang Liu , Yuchen He , Zhiyuan Ning , Chen Yijun , Wenge Que , Li Shi

We propose a novel hybrid stochastic policy gradient estimator by combining an unbiased policy gradient estimator, the REINFORCE estimator, with another biased one, an adapted SARAH estimator for policy optimization. The hybrid policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Nhan H. Pham , Lam M. Nguyen , Dzung T. Phan , Phuong Ha Nguyen , Marten van Dijk , Quoc Tran-Dinh

One of the challenges of aligning large models with human preferences lies in both the data requirements and the technical complexities of current approaches. Predominant methods, such as RLHF, involve multiple steps, each demanding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Siliang Zeng , Yao Liu , Huzefa Rangwala , George Karypis , Mingyi Hong , Rasool Fakoor

Post-training has split large language model (LLM) alignment into two largely disconnected tracks. Online reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards drives emergent reasoning on math and code but depends on a programmatic verifier…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are widely adopted in knowledge-intensive NLP tasks, but current evaluations often overlook the structural complexity and multi-step reasoning required in real-world scenarios. These benchmarks…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Jeongsoo Lee , Daeyong Kwon , Kyohoon Jin

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is crucial for aligning large language models with human preferences. While recent research has focused on algorithmic improvements, the importance of prompt-data construction has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Wei Shen , Guanlin Liu , Zheng Wu , Ruofei Zhu , Qingping Yang , Chao Xin , Yu Yue , Lin Yan

Recent studies increasingly explore Large Language Models (LLMs) as a new paradigm for recommendation systems due to their scalability and world knowledge. However, existing work has three key limitations: (1) most efforts focus on…

Reinforcement learning (RL) training is inherently unstable due to factors such as moving targets and high gradient variance. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault