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Policy entropy has emerged as a fundamental measure for understanding and controlling exploration in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for LLMs. However, existing entropy-aware methods mainly regulate entropy through…

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most popular deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of challenging tasks. However, as a model-free RL method, the success of PPO…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-11 Yuhui Wang , Hao He , Xiaoyang Tan , Yaozhong Gan

Entropy regularization is commonly used to improve policy optimization in reinforcement learning. It is believed to help with \emph{exploration} by encouraging the selection of more stochastic policies. In this work, we analyze this claim…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Zafarali Ahmed , Nicolas Le Roux , Mohammad Norouzi , Dale Schuurmans

Studies on generalization performance of machine learning algorithms under the scope of information theory suggest that compressed representations can guarantee good generalization, inspiring many compression-based regularization methods.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-16 Antoine Saporta , Yifu Chen , Michael Blot , Matthieu Cord

Large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs (MLL-Ms) excel at chain-of-thought reasoning but face distribution shift at test-time and a lack of verifiable supervision. Recent test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) methods derive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Jianghao Wu , Yasmeen George , Jin Ye , Yicheng Wu , Daniel F. Schmidt , Jianfei Cai

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Penghui Qi , Xiangxin Zhou , Zichen Liu , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Min Lin , Wee Sun Lee

Despite the many recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), the question of learning policies that robustly satisfy state constraints under unknown disturbances remains open. In this paper, we offer a new perspective on achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Pierre-François Massiani , Alexander von Rohr , Lukas Haverbeck , Sebastian Trimpe

The authors of 'Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning in Multiple environments' propose a method, alpha-MEPOL, to tackle unsupervised RL across multiple environments. They pre-train a task-agnostic exploration policy using interactions from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-10 Shaurya Dewan , Anisha Jain , Zoe LaLena , Lifan Yu

Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has had incredible achievements on high dimensional problems, yet its learning process remains unstable even on the simplest tasks. Deep RL uses neural networks as function approximators. These neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Riccardo Della Vecchia , Alena Shilova , Philippe Preux , Riad Akrour

Decoding strategies play a central role in shaping the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). Traditional methods such as greedy decoding and beam search often suffer from error propagation, while sampling-based approaches…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has improved the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), yet state-of-the-art methods still fail to learn on many training problems. On hard problems, on-policy RL rarely explores even a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Yuxiao Qu , Amrith Setlur , Virginia Smith , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Aviral Kumar

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has significantly boosted the reasoning capability of language models (LMs). However, existing RLVR approaches train LMs based on their own on-policy responses and are constrained by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Chenming Tang , Hsiu-Yuan Huang , Weijie Liu , Clive Bai , Saiyong Yang , Yunfang Wu

While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) significantly improves the factual reliability of LLMs, it does not eliminate hallucinations, so robust uncertainty quantification (UQ) remains essential. In this paper, we reveal that standard…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Alexandra Bazarova , Andrei Volodichev , Daria Kotova , Alexey Zaytsev

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

This paper examines the exploration-exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), a framework for improving the reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent studies suggest that RLVR can elicit strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Peter Chen , Xiaopeng Li , Ziniu Li , Wotao Yin , Xi Chen , Tianyi Lin

As access to high-quality, domain-specific data grows increasingly scarce, multi-epoch training has become a practical strategy for adapting large language models (LLMs). However, autoregressive models often suffer from performance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Jiapeng Wang , Yiwen Hu , Yanzipeng Gao , Haoyu Wang , Shuo Wang , Hongyu Lu , Jiaxin Mao , Wayne Xin Zhao , Junyi Li , Xiao Zhang

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verified Reward (RLVR) have driven the emergence of more sophisticated cognitive behaviors in large language models (LLMs), thereby enhancing their reasoning capabilities. However, in prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Qingbin Li , Rongkun Xue , Jie Wang , Ming Zhou , Zhi Li , Xiaofeng Ji , Yongqi Wang , Miao Liu , Zheming Yang , Minghui Qiu , Jing Yang

Tool-using agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in tasks such as mathematical reasoning and multi-hop question answering. However, in long trajectories, agents often trigger excessive and low-quality tool calls, increasing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Zeping Li , Hongru Wang , Yiwen Zhao , Guanhua Chen , Yixia Li , Keyang Chen , Yixin Cao , Guangnan Ye , Hongfeng Chai , Zhenfei Yin

Reasoning large language models (LLMs) excel in complex tasks, which has drawn significant attention to reinforcement learning (RL) for LLMs. However, existing approaches allocate an equal number of rollouts to all questions during the RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Mengqi Liao , Xiangyu Xi , Ruinian Chen , Jia Leng , Yangen Hu , Ke Zeng , Shuai Liu , Huaiyu Wan

With the advent of foundation models, prompt tuning has positioned itself as an important technique for directing model behaviors and eliciting desired responses. Prompt tuning regards selecting appropriate keywords included into the input,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Yunseon Choi , Sangmin Bae , Seonghyun Ban , Minchan Jeong , Chuheng Zhang , Lei Song , Li Zhao , Jiang Bian , Kee-Eung Kim