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Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard approach for large language models (LLMs) post-training to incentivize reasoning capacity. Among existing recipes, group-based policy gradient is prevalent, which…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a predominant technique to align language models (LMs) with human preferences or promote outputs which are deemed to be desirable by a given reward function. Standard RL approaches optimize average…

A key problem in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the mismatch, or distribution shift, between the dataset and the distribution over states and actions visited by the learned policy. This problem is exacerbated in the fully offline…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective for autoregressive language models, but adapting these methods to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) presents fundamental challenges. The core difficulty lies in likelihood…

The recent success of supervised learning methods on ever larger offline datasets has spurred interest in the reinforcement learning (RL) field to investigate whether the same paradigms can be translated to RL algorithms. This research…

We develop a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for improving an existing behavior policy via sparse, user-interpretable changes. Our goal is to make minimal changes while gaining as much benefit as possible. We define a minimal change…

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) learns a reward function to explain expert demonstrations. Modern IRL methods often use the adversarial (minimax) formulation that alternates between reward and policy optimization, which often lead to…

We introduce ConfPO, a method for preference learning in Large Language Models (LLMs) that identifies and optimizes preference-critical tokens based solely on the training policy's confidence, without requiring any auxiliary models or…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) with PPO-like clip objectives has become the standard choice for reward-based fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). Although recent work has explored improved estimators of advantages and normalization,…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) allows for the training of competent agents from offline datasets without any interaction with the environment. Online finetuning of such offline models can further improve performance. But how should we…

Post-training has become central to turning pretrained large language models (LLMs) into aligned, capable, and deployable systems. Recent progress spans supervised fine-tuning (SFT), preference optimization, reinforcement learning (RL),…

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values is critical as these models become increasingly integrated into various societal and decision-making processes. Traditional methods, such as reinforcement learning from human…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models can be viewed as an off-policy learning problem, where expert demonstrations come from a fixed behavior policy while training aims to optimize a target policy. Importance sampling is the…

Real-world decision-making tasks are usually partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), where the state is not fully observable. Recent progress has demonstrated that recurrent reinforcement learning (RL), which consists of a…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for inducing explicit reasoning behaviors in large language and vision-language models. However, reasoning-oriented RL post-training remains fundamentally challenging due to…

Recently, foundation models such as OpenAI's O1 and O3, along with DeepSeek's R1, have demonstrated strong reasoning capacities and problem-solving skills acquired through large-scale reinforcement learning (RL), with wide applications in…

Model-based algorithms, which learn a dynamics model from logged experience and perform some sort of pessimistic planning under the learned model, have emerged as a promising paradigm for offline reinforcement learning (offline RL).…

Modern LLM RL systems separate rollout generation from policy optimization. These two stages are expected to produce token probabilities that match exactly. However, implementation differences can make them assign different values to the…

This study investigates the effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning techniques on a compact language model (Qwen2.5-0.5B Base) for two challenging tasks: instruction following and mathematical reasoning. We compare…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) learns effective policies from a static target dataset. The performance of state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms notwithstanding, it relies on the size of the target dataset, and it degrades if limited…