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Large language models are often post-trained with sparse verifier rewards, which indicate whether a sampled trajectory succeeds but provide limited guidance about where reasoning succeeds or fails. On-policy distillation (OPD) offers denser…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Weichen Yu , Xiaomin Li , Yizhou Zhao , Xiaoze Liu , Ruowang Zhang , Haixin Wang , Yinyi Luo , Chen Henry Wu , Gaurav Mittal , Matt Fredrikson , Yu Hu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs), but the widely used Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) often suffers from entropy collapse: exploration quickly disappears, policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Chen Wang , Zhaochun Li , Jionghao Bai , Hexuan Deng , Ge Lan , Yue Wang

Knowledge distillation improves large language model (LLM) reasoning by compressing the knowledge of a teacher LLM to train smaller LLMs. On-policy distillation advances this approach by having the student sample its own trajectories while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Siyan Zhao , Zhihui Xie , Mengchen Liu , Jing Huang , Guan Pang , Feiyu Chen , Aditya Grover

On-policy reinforcement learning has become the dominant paradigm for reasoning alignment in large language models, yet its sparse, outcome-level rewards make token-level credit assignment notoriously difficult. On-Policy Distillation (OPD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Binbin Zheng , Xing Ma , Yiheng Liang , Jingqing Ruan , Xiaoliang Fu , Kepeng Lin , Benchang Zhu , Ke Zeng , Xunliang Cai

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…

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are typically characterized as algorithms that perform policy updates using i.i.d. trajectories collected by the agent's current policy. However, after observing only a finite number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Nicholas E. Corrado , Josiah P. Hanna

Aligning language models with human preferences relies on pairwise preference datasets. While some studies suggest that on-policy data consistently outperforms off -policy data for preference learning, others indicate that the advantages of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Tianjian Li , Daniel Khashabi

In this paper, a new population-guided parallel learning scheme is proposed to enhance the performance of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). In the proposed scheme, multiple identical learners with their own value-functions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Whiyoung Jung , Giseung Park , Youngchul Sung

This paper introduces TempSamp-R1, a new reinforcement fine-tuning framework designed to improve the effectiveness of adapting multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to video temporal grounding tasks. We reveal that existing reinforcement…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Yunheng Li , Jing Cheng , Shaoyong Jia , Hangyi Kuang , Shaohui Jiao , Qibin Hou , Ming-Ming Cheng

Sample efficiency is one of the most critical issues for online reinforcement learning (RL). Existing methods achieve higher sample efficiency by adopting model-based methods, Q-ensemble, or better exploration mechanisms. We, instead,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Jiafei Lyu , Le Wan , Zongqing Lu , Xiu Li

The Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a reinforcement learning method used to fine-tune large language models (LLMs), has proved its effectiveness in practical applications such as DeepSeek-R1. It raises a question whether GRPO can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Yanchen Xu , Ziheng Jiao , Hongyuan Zhang , Xuelong Li

User information needs are often highly diverse and varied. A key challenge in current research is how to achieve controllable multi-objective generation while enabling rapid adaptation to accommodate diverse user demands during test time.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Guofu Xie , Xiao Zhang , Ting Yao , Yunsheng Shi

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yang Guan , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li , Jie Li , Jianyu Chen , Bo Cheng

On-policy distillation (OPD) has recently emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for consolidating the capabilities of specialized expert models into a single student model. Despite its empirical success, the conditions under which…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become the core paradigm for aligning and strengthening large language models (LLMs). Yet, applying RL in off-policy settings--where stale data from past policies are used for training--improves…

This paper introduces two novel modifications to the Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO) algorithm [1], approached from a mixed-policy perspective. Standard policy gradient methods can suffer from instability and sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Hongze Tan , Yuchen Li

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning has emerged as a powerful approach for aligning diffusion models with black-box objectives. Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is a popular choice of method for policy optimization. While…

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

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) expands the knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet current static retrieval methods struggle with complex, multi-hop problems. While recent dynamic retrieval strategies offer improvements, they…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Haijian Liang , Zenghao Niu , Junjie Wu , Changwang Zhang , Wangchunshu Zhou , Jun Wang

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong multilingual capabilities, yet often fail to consistently generate responses in the intended language, exhibiting a phenomenon known as language confusion. Prior mitigation approaches based on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Jinho Choo , JunSeung Lee , Jimyeong Kim , Yeeho Song , S. K. Hong , Yeong-Dae Kwon