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Related papers: RePO: Bridging On-Policy Learning and Off-Policy K…

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Reinforcement learning (RL) is vital for optimizing large language models (LLMs). Recent Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) estimates advantages using multiple on-policy outputs per prompt, leading to high computational costs and low…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Siheng Li , Zhanhui Zhou , Wai Lam , Chao Yang , Chaochao Lu

Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently use on-policy algorithms, such as PPO or GRPO. However, policy lag from distributed training architectures and differences between the training and inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Daniel Ritter , Owen Oertell , Bradley Guo , Jonathan Chang , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities in well-defined problems with clear solutions, such as mathematics and coding. However, they still struggle with complex real-world scenarios like business…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Xiaoqian Liu , Ke Wang , Yongbin Li , Yuchuan Wu , Wentao Ma , Aobo Kong , Fei Huang , Jianbin Jiao , Junge Zhang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated its potential to improve the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). One major limitation of most existing Reinforcement Finetuning (RFT) methods is that they are on-policy RL in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Jing Liang , Hongyao Tang , Yi Ma , Jinyi Liu , Yan Zheng , Shuyue Hu , Lei Bai , Jianye Hao

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 algorithms are fundamental to align large language models with human preferences and to enhance their reasoning capabilities. However, current reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from training instability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Yaru Hao , Li Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Zewen Chi , Furu Wei

Large scale reinforcement learning has become a central tool for improving reasoning in large language models. At this scale, generation is often lagged or asynchronous, so updates are performed on data collected by older policies. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Otmane Sakhi , Aleksei Arzhantsev , Imad Aouali , Flavian Vasile

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are promising alternatives to autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), as they potentially allow higher inference throughput. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a crucial component for dLLMs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yuchen Zhu , Wei Guo , Jaemoo Choi , Petr Molodyk , Bo Yuan , Molei Tao , Yongxin Chen

RL-based post-training of language models is almost exclusively done using on-policy methods such as PPO. These methods cannot learn from arbitrary sequences such as those produced earlier in training, in earlier runs, by human experts or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Taco Cohen , David W. Zhang , Kunhao Zheng , Yunhao Tang , Remi Munos , Gabriel Synnaeve

Large language models (LLMs) benefit substantially from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) in reasoning tasks. However, these recipes perform poorly in instruction-based molecular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Xuan Li , Zhanke Zhou , Zongze Li , Jiangchao Yao , Yu Rong , Lu Zhang , Bo Han

Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) is attracting growing interest, driven by practical constraints in real-world applications, the complexity of LLM-RL infrastructure, and the need for further…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Chaorui Yao , Yanxi Chen , Yuchang Sun , Yushuo Chen , Wenhao Zhang , Xuchen Pan , Yaliang Li , Bolin Ding

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), encounter the challenge of distribution shift. Current approaches typically address this issue…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Qiyuan Deng , Xuefeng Bai , Kehai Chen , Yaowei Wang , Liqiang Nie , Min Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become central to enhancing reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Yet on-policy algorithms such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) often suffer in early training: noisy gradients from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Ziyan Wang , Zheng Wang , Xingwei Qu , Qi Cheng , Jie Fu , Shengpu Tang , Minjia Zhang , Xiaoming Huo

Large reasoning models (LRMs) are commonly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to explore long chain-of-thought reasoning, achieving strong performance at high computational cost. Recent methods add multi-reward objectives to jointly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anhao Zhao , Ziyang Chen , Junlong Tong , Yingqi Fan , Fanghua Ye , Shuhao Li , Yunpu Ma , Wenjie Li , Xiaoyu Shen

On-policy reinforcement learning methods, like Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), often demand extensive data per update, leading to sample inefficiency. This paper introduces Reflective Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Yaozhong Gan , Renye Yan , Zhe Wu , Junliang Xing

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are two prominent post-training paradigms for refining the capabilities and aligning the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing approaches that integrate SFT and RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Wenhao Zhang , Yuexiang Xie , Yuchang Sun , Yanxi Chen , Guoyin Wang , Yaliang Li , Bolin Ding , Jingren Zhou

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has emerged as a crucial method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human-annotated demonstrations. However, SFT, being an off-policy approach similar to behavior cloning, often struggles with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Qingru Zhang , Liang Qiu , Ilgee Hong , Zhenghao Xu , Tianyi Liu , Shiyang Li , Rongzhi Zhang , Zheng Li , Lihong Li , Bing Yin , Chao Zhang , Jianshu Chen , Haoming Jiang , Tuo Zhao

Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs). Off-policy methods offer greater implementation simplicity and data efficiency than on-policy techniques, but often result in suboptimal performance. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Charles Arnal , Gaëtan Narozniak , Vivien Cabannes , Yunhao Tang , Julia Kempe , Remi Munos

Traditional on-policy Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) frameworks suffer from experience waste and reward homogeneity, which directly hinders learning efficiency on difficult samples during large language models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Xu Wan , Yansheng Wang , Wenqi Huang , Mingyang Sun

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are often categorized as either on-policy or off-policy depending on whether they use data from a target policy of interest or from a different behavior policy. In this paper, we study a subtle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Rujie Zhong , Duohan Zhang , Lukas Schäfer , Stefano V. Albrecht , Josiah P. Hanna
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