Related papers: TRE: Encouraging Exploration in the Trust Region

Recent advancements in reasoning-focused language models such as OpenAI's O1 and DeepSeek-R1 have shown that scaling test-time computation-through chain-of-thought reasoning and iterative exploration-can yield substantial improvements on…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become the dominant paradigm for strengthening the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Yet the rule-based reward functions commonly used on mathematical or programming benchmarks…

General reasoning represents a long-standing and formidable challenge in artificial intelligence. Recent breakthroughs, exemplified by large language models (LLMs) and chain-of-thought prompting, have achieved considerable success on…

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has significantly advanced the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), particularly in their mathemat ical reasoning performance. However, GRPO and related entropy regularization methods…

We propose a new \emph{Transformed Risk Minimization} (TRM) framework as an extension of classical risk minimization. In TRM, we optimize not only over predictive models, but also over data transformations; specifically over distributions…

Recent advancements have established Reinforcement Learning (RL) as a pivotal paradigm for aligning generative models with human intent. However, group-based optimization frameworks (e.g., GRPO) face a critical limitation: the rapid decay…

Reinforcement learning plays a crucial role in generative re-ranking scenarios due to its exploration-exploitation capabilities, but existing generative methods mostly fail to adapt to the dynamic entropy changes in model difficulty during…

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has been positioned by recent literature as the canonical method for the RL part of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). PPO performs well empirically but has a heuristic motivation and…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a powerful paradigm for optimizing large language models (LLMs) to handle complex reasoning tasks. A core challenge in this process lies in managing policy entropy, which reflects the balance between…

We consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for Markov decision processes with safety constraints. We formulate the problem in a reach-avoid setup. Our goal is to design online reinforcement learning algorithms that ensure safety…

Large language models (LLMs) often generate plausible yet incorrect answers, posing risks in safety-critical settings such as medicine. Human evaluation is expensive, and LLM-as-judge approaches risk introducing hidden errors. Recent…

Prior work has explored directly regularizing the output distributions of probabilistic models to alleviate peaky (i.e. over-confident) predictions, a common sign of overfitting. This class of techniques, of which label smoothing is one,…

Domain-specific intelligence demands specialized knowledge and sophisticated reasoning for problem-solving, posing significant challenges for large language models (LLMs) that struggle with knowledge hallucination and inadequate reasoning…

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) for chain-of-thought reasoning presents a significant challenge: supervised fine-tuning on a single "golden" rationale hurts generalization as it penalizes equally valid alternatives, whereas…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Reinforcement Learning(RL) with sparse rewards is a major challenge. We propose \emph{Hindsight Trust Region Policy Optimization}(HTRPO), a new RL algorithm that extends the highly successful TRPO algorithm with \emph{hindsight} to tackle…

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), agents have no incentive to exhibit predictable behaviors, and are often pushed (through e.g. policy entropy regularisation) to randomise their actions in favor of exploration. This often makes it challenging…

Modern large language models (LLMs) are often evaluated and deployed under a one-shot, greedy inference protocol, especially in professional settings that require deterministic behavior. This regime can systematically under-estimate a fixed…

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models (LLMs). Current RLVR methods often overemphasize exploitation, leading to entropy…

Effectively training Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex, long-CoT reasoning is often bottlenecked by the need for massive high-quality reasoning data. Existing methods are either computationally expensive or fail to reliably…