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Post-training paradigms for Large Language Models (LLMs), primarily Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), face a fundamental dilemma: SFT provides stability (low variance) but suffers from high fitting bias, while RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Taojie Zhu , Dongyang Xu , Ding Zou , Sen Zhao , Qiaobo Hao , Zhiguo Yang , Yonghong He

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) focuses on training reward-maximizing agents subject to pre-defined safety constraints. Yet, learning versatile safe policies that can adapt to varying safety constraint requirements during deployment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Yihang Yao , Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Jiacheng Zhu , Wenhao Yu , Tingnan Zhang , Ding Zhao

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, yet current methods face key challenges in resource allocation and policy optimization dynamics: (i) uniform rollout…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Yangyi Fang , Jiaye Lin , Xiaoliang Fu , Cong Qin , Haolin Shi , Chaowen Hu , Lu Pan , Ke Zeng , Xunliang Cai

The dominant paradigm for RLHF is online and on-policy RL: synchronously generating from the large language model (LLM) policy, labelling with a reward model, and learning using feedback on the LLM's own outputs. While performant, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Michael Noukhovitch , Shengyi Huang , Sophie Xhonneux , Arian Hosseini , Rishabh Agarwal , Aaron Courville

Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Daoming Lyu , Qi Qi , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Hengshuai Yao , Tianbao Yang , Bo Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central component of post-training for large language models (LLMs), particularly for complex reasoning tasks that require stable optimization over long generation horizons. However, achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yuepeng Sheng , Yuwei Huang , Shuman Liu , Anxiang Zeng , Haibo Zhang

When applying reinforcement learning--typically through GRPO--to large vision-language model reasoning struggles to effectively scale reasoning length or generates verbose outputs across all tasks with only marginal gains in accuracy. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Wenyi Xiao , Leilei Gan

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown strong performance in LLM post-training, but real-world deployment often involves noisy or incomplete supervision. In such settings, complex and unreliable supervision signals can destabilize training…

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 become an effective paradigm for improving the reasoning ability of large language models. However, widely used RLVR algorithms, such as GRPO, often suffer from entropy collapse,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Huimin Xu , Shuai Zhao , Xiaobao Wu , Anh Tuan Luu

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is an essential paradigm that enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods typically rely on static policy optimization schemes that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yiming Huang , Zhenbo Shi , Shuzheng Gao , Cuiyun Gao , Peiyi Han , Chuanyi Liu

Existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods for large language models have advanced rapidly, yet their design has largely been guided by heuristics rather than systematic theoretical principles. This gap limits our…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-16 Zixun Huang , Jiayi Sheng , Zeyu Zheng

Since DeepSeek-R1 popularized, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become the core part of training Reasoning LLMs. However, we find some deficiency that influences RL stability and inference efficiency, like zero-variance in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Chen Li , Nazhou Liu , Kai Yang

Recent advances in rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) have significantly improved the reasoning capability of language models (LMs) with rule-based rewards. However, existing RL methods -- such as GRPO, REINFORCE++, and RLOO -- often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Zongkai Liu , Fanqing Meng , Lingxiao Du , Zhixiang Zhou , Chao Yu , Wenqi Shao , Qiaosheng Zhang

Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a key technique for training large reasoning models, yet it suffers from a critical vulnerability: the \emph{Think-Answer Mismatch}, where noisy reward signals corrupt the learning process. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Si Shen , Peijun Shen , Wenhua Zhao , Danhao Zhu

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer a promising route to parallel and efficient text generation, but improving their reasoning ability requires effective post-training. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Zichao Yu , Shengze Xu , Bingqing Jiang , Wenyi Zhang , Difan Zou

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) post-training has become pivotal for enhancing the capabilities of modern large models. A recent trend is to develop RL systems with a fully disaggregated architecture, which decouples the three RL phases…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Haoyang Li , Sheng Lin , Fangcheng Fu , Yuming Zhou , Xiaodong Ji , Yanfeng Zhao , Lefeng Wang , Jie Jiang , Bin Cui

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are powerful at integrating diverse data, but they often struggle with complex reasoning. While Reinforcement learning (RL) can boost reasoning in LLMs, applying it to MLLMs is tricky. Common issues…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Minjie Hong , Zirun Guo , Yan Xia , Zehan Wang , Ziang Zhang , Tao Jin , Zhou Zhao

Reinforcement learning has become a central paradigm for improving LLM reasoning. However, existing methods use a single policy to produce both inference responses and training optimization trajectories. The objective conflict between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Jingchu Wang , Bingbing Xu , Yige Yuan , Bin Xie , Xiaoqian Sun , Huawei Shen