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Group-based reinforcement learning methods, like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), are widely used nowadays to post-train large language models. Despite their empirical success, they exhibit structural mismatches between reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Aleksandar Fontana , Marco Simoni , Giulio Rossolini , Andrea Saracino , Paolo Mori

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) was introduced and used recently for promoting reasoning in LLMs under verifiable (binary) rewards. We show that the mean + variance calibration of these rewards induces a weighted contrastive loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Youssef Mroueh

To design rewards that align with human goals, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a prominent technique for learning reward functions from human preferences and optimizing policies via reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Taehyun Cho , Seokhun Ju , Seungyub Han , Dohyeong Kim , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

Post-training plays a crucial role in refining and aligning large language models to meet specific tasks and human preferences. While recent advancements in post-training techniques, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO),…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Kaichen Zhang , Yuzhong Hong , Junwei Bao , Hongfei Jiang , Yang Song , Dingqian Hong , Hui Xiong

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, effectively aligning LLMs with diverse human preferences remains a significant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Chengao Li , Hanyu Zhang , Yunkun Xu , Hongyan Xue , Xiang Ao , Qing He

In the classical Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) framework, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is employed to learn from sparse, sentence-level rewards -- a challenging scenario in traditional deep reinforcement learning.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Han Zhong , Zikang Shan , Guhao Feng , Wei Xiong , Xinle Cheng , Li Zhao , Di He , Jiang Bian , Liwei Wang

In this paper, we explore how directly pretraining a value model simplifies and stabilizes reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). In reinforcement learning, value estimation is the key to policy optimization, distinct from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Chenghua Huang , Lu Wang , Fangkai Yang , Pu Zhao , Zhixu Li , Qingwei Lin , Dongmei Zhang , Saravan Rajmohan , Qi Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven effective in strengthening the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). A widely adopted method, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has shown strong empirical results in training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Peter Chen , Xiaopeng Li , Ziniu Li , Xi Chen , Tianyi Lin

Aligning language models (LMs) with curated human feedback is critical to control their behaviors in real-world applications. Several recent policy optimization methods, such as DPO and SLiC, serve as promising alternatives to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Tianqi Liu , Zhen Qin , Junru Wu , Jiaming Shen , Misha Khalman , Rishabh Joshi , Yao Zhao , Mohammad Saleh , Simon Baumgartner , Jialu Liu , Peter J. Liu , Xuanhui Wang

Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as the standard for training reasoning capabilities in large language models through reinforcement learning. By estimating advantages using group-mean rewards rather than a learned…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Anisha Garg , Claire Zhang , Nishit Neema , David Bick , Ganesh Venkatesh , Joel Hestness

Process reward models (PRMs) allow for fine-grained credit assignment in reinforcement learning (RL), and seemingly contrast with outcome reward models (ORMs), which assign a single reward to an entire trajectory. However, we provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Michael Sullivan , Alexander Koller

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has been the dominant approach for improving the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recently, Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has simplified this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yining Wang , Jinman Zhao , Chuangxin Zhao , Shuhao Guan , Gerald Penn , Shinan Liu

Reward inference (learning a reward model from human preferences) is a critical intermediate step in the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) pipeline for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs). In practice, RLHF faces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Qining Zhang , Lei Ying

Policy optimization for large language models often suffers from sparse reward signals in multi-step reasoning tasks. Critic-free methods like GRPO assign a single normalized outcome reward to all tokens, providing limited guidance for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Ruiyi Ding , Yongxuan Lv , Xianhui Meng , Jiahe Song , Chao Wang , Chen Jiang , Yuan Cheng

Recent work shows that preference alignment objectives can be interpreted as divergence estimators between aligned (preferred) & unaligned (less-preferred) distributions, yielding a principled recipe for designing alignment losses. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Rajdeep Haldar , Lantao Mei , Guang Lin , Yue Xing , Qifan Song

Aligning generative models with human preference via RLHF typically suffers from overoptimization, where an imperfectly learned reward model can misguide the generative model to output undesired responses. We investigate this problem in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Zhihan Liu , Miao Lu , Shenao Zhang , Boyi Liu , Hongyi Guo , Yingxiang Yang , Jose Blanchet , Zhaoran Wang

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a prevalent approach to align AI systems with human values by learning rewards from human preference data. Due to various reasons, however, such data typically takes the form of rankings…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Ilgee Hong , Zichong Li , Alexander Bukharin , Yixiao Li , Haoming Jiang , Tianbao Yang , Tuo Zhao

Reinforcement learning with verifiable reward has recently emerged as a central paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs); however, prevailing mean-based methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Tao Ren , Jinyang Jiang , Hui Yang , Wan Tian , Minhao Zou , Guanghao Li , Zishi Zhang , Qinghao Wang , Shentao Qin , Yanjun Zhao , Rui Tao , Hui Shao , Yijie Peng

The prevalent deployment of learning from human preferences through reinforcement learning (RLHF) relies on two important approximations: the first assumes that pairwise preferences can be substituted with pointwise rewards. The second…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar , Mark Rowland , Bilal Piot , Daniel Guo , Daniele Calandriello , Michal Valko , Rémi Munos

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a practical route to improve large language model reasoning, and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a widely used optimizer in this setting. However, RLVR training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Tue Le , Linh Ngo Van , Trung Le