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Reinforcement learning has become central to post-training large language models, yet dominant algorithms rely on clipping mechanisms that introduce optimization issues at scale, including zero-gradient regions, reward hacking, and training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Ömer Veysel Çağatan , Barış Akgün , Gözde Gül Şahin , Xuandong Zhao

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences remains a key challenge. While post-training techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have achieved…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Qingyu Yin , Chak Tou Leong , Minjun Zhu , Hanqi Yan , Qiang Zhang , Yulan He , Wenjie Li , Jun Wang , Yue Zhang , Linyi Yang

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

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

Learning to Optimize (LtO) is a problem setting in which a machine learning (ML) model is trained to emulate a constrained optimization solver. Learning to produce optimal and feasible solutions subject to complex constraints is a difficult…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-18 James Kotary , Ferdinando Fioretto

Many reinforcement learning algorithms can be seen as versions of approximate policy iteration (API). While standard API often performs poorly, it has been shown that learning can be stabilized by regularizing each policy update by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Nevena Lazić , Botao Hao , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Dale Schuurmans , Csaba Szepesvári

Reinforcement learning (RL) has re-emerged as a natural approach for training interactive LLM agents in real-world environments. However, directly applying the widely used Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm to multi-turn…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Junbo Li , Peng Zhou , Rui Meng , Meet P. Vadera , Lihong Li , Yang Li

Decoupled PPO has been a successful reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to deal with the high data staleness under the asynchronous RL setting. Decoupled loss used in decoupled PPO improves coupled-loss style of algorithms' (e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Xiaocan Li , Shiliang Wu , Zheng Shen

Reinforcement Learning (RL) can directly enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models without extensive reliance on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this work, we revisit the traditional Policy Gradient (PG) mechanism and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Xiangxiang Chu , Hailang Huang , Xiao Zhang , Fei Wei , Yong Wang

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) has yielded state-of-the-art results in policy search, a subfield of reinforcement learning, with one of its key points being the use of a surrogate objective function to restrict the step size at each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-07 Wangshu Zhu , Andre Rosendo

We observe that several existing policy gradient methods (such as vanilla policy gradient, PPO, A2C) may suffer from overly large gradients when the current policy is close to deterministic (even in some very simple environments), leading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Chuheng Zhang , Yuanqi Li , Jian Li

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs), which offer a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive LLMs, have recently shown strong results in pretraining. However, due to their lack of tractable sequence-level likelihoods, they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Anthony Zhan

Recent advances in alignment techniques such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have improved the safety of large language models (LLMs). However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Mengxuan Hu , Vivek V. Datla , Anoop Kumar , Zihan Guan , Sheng Li , Alfy Samuel , Daben Liu

Dynamic real-time optimization (DRTO) is a challenging task due to the fact that optimal operating conditions must be computed in real time. The main bottleneck in the industrial application of DRTO is the presence of uncertainty. Many…

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most successful deep reinforcement-learning methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of challenging tasks. However, its optimization behavior is still far from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-15 Yuhui Wang , Hao He , Chao Wen , Xiaoyang Tan

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models such as OpenVLA, Octo, and $\pi_0$ have shown strong generalization by leveraging large-scale demonstrations, yet their performance is still fundamentally constrained by the quality and coverage of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Mingyang Lyu , Yinqian Sun , Erliang Lin , Huangrui Li , Ruolin Chen , Feifei Zhao , Yi Zeng

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) plays a crucial role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and preferences. However, the quality and stability of the trained reward model largely determine the final…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Chunjin Jian , Xinhua Zhu

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), particularly Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), adapts large language models (LLMs) by training only a small fraction of parameters. However, as the rank of the low-rank matrices used for adaptation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Yupeng Chang , Chenlu Guo , Yi Chang , Yuan Wu

In this work, we present a simple yet theoretically motivated improvement to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for the Large Language Model (LLM), addressing its limited generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). Through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yongliang Wu , Yizhou Zhou , Zhou Ziheng , Yingzhe Peng , Xinyu Ye , Xinting Hu , Wenbo Zhu , Lu Qi , Ming-Hsuan Yang , Xu Yang

Safety alignment of large language models remains brittle under domain shift and noisy preference supervision. Most existing robust alignment methods focus on uncertainty in alignment data, while overlooking optimization-induced fragility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Yonghui Yang , Wenjian Tao , Jilong Liu , Xingyu Zhu , Junfeng Fang , Weibiao Huang , Le Wu , Richang Hong , Tat-Sent Chua