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As language models become increasingly capable, users expect them to provide not only accurate responses but also behaviors aligned with diverse human preferences across a variety of scenarios. To achieve this, Reinforcement learning (RL)…

Adapting large language models (LLMs) for specific tasks usually involves fine-tuning through reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) on preference data. While these data often come from diverse labelers' groups (e.g., different…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Shyam Sundhar Ramesh , Yifan Hu , Iason Chaimalas , Viraj Mehta , Pier Giuseppe Sessa , Haitham Bou Ammar , Ilija Bogunovic

Recent large reasoning models (LRMs) driven by reinforcement learning algorithms (e.g., GRPO) have achieved remarkable performance on challenging reasoning tasks. However, these models suffer from overthinking, generating unnecessarily long…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Gang Li , Yan Chen , Ming Lin , Tianbao Yang

RLVR has enhanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various tasks. However, GRPO, a representative RLVR algorithm, suffers from a critical limitation: when all responses within a group are either entirely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Gongrui Nan , Siye Chen , Jing Huang , Mengyu Lu , Dexun Wang , Chunmei Xie , Weiqi Xiong , Xianzhou Zeng , Qixuan Zhou , Yadong Li , Xingzhong Xu

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely used for critic-free Large Language Model (LLM) post-training, but its KL regularization is usually implemented as a local loss-side token penalty. We show that this misses the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jiarui Yao , Ruida Wang , Hao Bai , Tong Zhang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, recent studies question whether RL genuinely expands reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Dayu Wang , Jiaye Yang , Weikang Li , Jiahui Liang , Yang Li

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising capabilities in reasoning tasks, yet still struggle with complex problems requiring explicit self-reflection and self-correction, especially compared to their unimodal text-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Zhongwei Wan , Zhihao Dou , Che Liu , Yu Zhang , Dongfei Cui , Qinjian Zhao , Hui Shen , Jing Xiong , Yi Xin , Yifan Jiang , Chaofan Tao , Yangfan He , Mi Zhang , Shen Yan

Policy optimization, which finds the desired policy by maximizing value functions via optimization techniques, lies at the heart of reinforcement learning (RL). In addition to value maximization, other practical considerations arise as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-12 Wenhao Zhan , Shicong Cen , Baihe Huang , Yuxin Chen , Jason D. Lee , Yuejie Chi

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

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging direct outcome verification instead of learned reward models. Building on this paradigm, Group…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Jingyi Wang , Lei Zhu , Tengjin Weng , Song-Li Wu , Haochen Tan , Jierun Chen , Chaofan Tao , Haoli Bai , Lu Hou , Lifeng Shang , Xiao-Ping Zhang

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has significantly enhanced the reasoning capability of large language models by optimizing the arithmetic mean of token-level rewards. Unfortunately, GRPO is observed to suffer from unstable policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Yuzhong Zhao , Yue Liu , Junpeng Liu , Jingye Chen , Xun Wu , Yaru Hao , Tengchao Lv , Shaohan Huang , Lei Cui , Qixiang Ye , Fang Wan , Furu Wei

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), due to the deterministic verification, becomes a dominant paradigm for enhancing the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). The community witnesses the rapid change from the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Mingwei Xu , Hao Fang

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

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) for multi-turn Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) - where models iteratively reason, generate code, and verify through execution - remains challenging for existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yifeng Ding , Hung Le , Songyang Han , Kangrui Ruan , Zhenghui Jin , Varun Kumar , Zijian Wang , Anoop Deoras

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become a standard approach for training mathematical reasoning models; however, its reliance on multiple completions per prompt makes training computationally expensive. Although recent work has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Kangda Wei , Ruihong Huang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has achieved remarkable success in improving autoregressive models, especially in domains requiring correctness like mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, directly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Chenxing Wei , Jiazhen Kang , Hong Wang , Jianqing Zhang , Hao Jiang , Xiaolong Xu , Ningyuan Sun , Ying He , F. Richard Yu , Yao Shu , Bo Jiang

Tremendous progress has been made in reinforcement learning (RL) over the past decade. Most of these advancements came through the continual development of new algorithms, which were designed using a combination of mathematical derivations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Chris Lu , Jakub Grudzien Kuba , Alistair Letcher , Luke Metz , Christian Schroeder de Witt , Jakob Foerster

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) enhances LLM reasoning but often induces overconfidence, where incorrect responses yield lower perplexity than correct ones, degrading relative calibration as described by the Area Under the Curve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Ziqi Wang , Xingzhou Lou , Meiqi Wu , Zhengqi Wen , Junge Zhang

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

The advantage function is a central concept in RL that helps reduce variance in policy gradient estimates. For language modeling, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) was proposed to use the within-group sample mean as a baseline for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Hu Wang , Congbo Ma , Ian Reid , Mohammad Yaqub