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Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key driver of language model reasoning. Among RL algorithms, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is the de facto standard, avoiding the need for a critic by using per-prompt baselines and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Cheng Ge , Caitlyn Heqi Yin , Hao Liang , Jiawei Zhang

Post-training methods, especially Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), play an important role in improving large language models' (LLMs) complex reasoning abilities. However, the dominant two-stage pipeline (SFT…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Mingyu Su , Jian Guan , Yuxian Gu , Minlie Huang , Hongning Wang

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

This paper provides a self-contained, from-scratch, exposition of key algorithms for instruction tuning of models: SFT, Rejection Sampling, REINFORCE, Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), Group…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Rohit Patel

In natural language processing tasks, pure reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning methods often suffer from inefficient exploration and slow convergence; while supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods, although efficient in training, have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Min Zeng , Jingfei Sun , Xueyou Luo , Caiquan Liu , Shiqi Zhang , Li Xie , Xiaoxin Chen

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is highly effective for post-training autoregressive (AR) language models, yet its direct application to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) often triggers reward collapse. We identify two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Jianyuan Zhong , Kaibo Wang , Ding Ding , Zijin Feng , Haoli Bai , Yang Xiang , Jiacheng Sun , Qiang Xu

Blind Face Restoration (BFR) encounters inherent challenges in exploring its large solution space, leading to common artifacts like missing details and identity ambiguity in the restored images. To tackle these challenges, we propose a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Bin Wu , Yahui Liu , Chi Zhang , Yao Zhao , Wei Wang

In an era where tool-augmented AI agents are becoming increasingly vital, our findings highlight the ability of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to empower SLMs, which are traditionally constrained in tool use. The ability to use…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Dhruvi Paprunia , Vansh Kharidia , Pankti Doshi

Text-to-audio (T2A) generation has advanced considerably in recent years, yet existing methods continue to face challenges in accurately rendering complex text prompts, particularly those involving intricate audio effects, and achieving…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-03 Yi Gu , Yanqing Liu , Chen Yang , Sheng Zhao

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) reasoning have been largely attributed to the rise of reinforcement Learning (RL), which has shifted the community's focus away from the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) paradigm. Many studies…

Image-based reinforcement learning (RL) faces significant challenges in generalization when the visual environment undergoes substantial changes between training and deployment. Under such circumstances, learned policies may not perform…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Weiyao Wang , Xinyuan Fang , Gregory D. Hager

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

Aligning large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific data remains a fundamental challenge. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) offers a straightforward way to inject domain knowledge but often degrades the model's generality. In contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Linxuan Xia , Xiaolong Yang , Yongyuan Chen , Enyue Zhao , Deng Cai , Yasheng Wang , Boxi Wu

Inspired by the success of reinforcement learning (RL) in refining large language models (LLMs), we propose AR-GRPO, an approach to integrate online RL training into autoregressive (AR) image generation models. We adapt the Group Relative…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Shihao Yuan , Yahui Liu , Yang Yue , Jingyuan Zhang , Wangmeng Zuo , Qi Wang , Fuzheng Zhang , Guorui Zhou

Existing LLMs-post-training techniques are broadly categorized into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). Each paradigm presents a distinct trade-off: (1) SFT excels at mimicking demonstration data, but can lead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Zeyu Huang , Tianhao Cheng , Zihan Qiu , Zili Wang , Yinghui Xu , Edoardo M. Ponti , Ivan Titov

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a transformative approach for aligning and enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs), addressing critical challenges in instruction following, ethical alignment, and reasoning capabilities. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Saksham Sahai Srivastava , Vaneet Aggarwal

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for improving the reasoning capabilities of language models (LMs) in domains such as mathematics and coding. However, most modern RL algorithms were designed to target robotics…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Lianghuan Huang , Shuo Li , Sagnik Anupam , Insup Lee , Osbert Bastani

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning has become a crucial step in post-training language models for advanced mathematical reasoning and coding. Following the success of frontier reasoning models, recent work has demonstrated that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Rosie Zhao , Alexandru Meterez , Sham Kakade , Cengiz Pehlevan , Samy Jelassi , Eran Malach

Behavior Cloning (BC) on curated (or filtered) data is the predominant paradigm for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models; as well as for imitation learning of control policies. Here, we draw on a connection between this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Chongli Qin , Jost Tobias Springenberg

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a variant of RL where the policy is learned from a previously collected dataset of trajectories and rewards. In our work, we propose a practical approach to offline RL with large language models…