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Adaptive rank allocation for LoRA, allocating more parameters to important layers and fewer to unimportant ones, consistently improves efficiency under supervised fine-tuning (SFT). We investigate whether this success transfers to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yash Ganpat Sawant

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

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a paradigm of artificial intelligence where an agent uses a neural network to learn which actions to take in a given environment. DRL has recently gained traction from being able to solve complex…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Rajdeep Singh Hundal , Yan Xiao , Xiaochun Cao , Jin Song Dong , Manuel Rigger

Recently, Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable progress with the emergence of various algorithms and datasets. However, these methods usually focus on algorithmic advancements, ignoring that many low-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Bingyi Kang , Xiao Ma , Yirui Wang , Yang Yue , Shuicheng Yan

Existing post-training techniques are broadly categorized into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) methods; the former is stable during training but suffers from limited generalization, while the latter, despite its…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Daoan Zhang , Guangchen Lan , Dong-Jun Han , Wenlin Yao , Xiaoman Pan , Hongming Zhang , Mingxiao Li , Pengcheng Chen , Yu Dong , Christopher Brinton , Jiebo Luo

In order to improve reproducibility, deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been adopting better scientific practices such as standardized evaluation metrics and reporting. However, the process of hyperparameter optimization still varies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Theresa Eimer , Marius Lindauer , Roberta Raileanu

Large language models (LLMs) trained via pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can still produce harmful and misaligned outputs, or struggle in domains like math and coding. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhichao Wang , Kiran Ramnath , Bin Bi , Shiva Kumar Pentyala , Sougata Chaudhuri , Shubham Mehrotra , Zixu , Zhu , Xiang-Bo Mao , Sitaram Asur , Na , Cheng

This study evaluates Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, testing three configurations: (1) with Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), (2) without SFT, and (3)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Amir Saeidi , Shivanshu Verma , Md Nayem Uddin , Chitta Baral

Pre-training large language models is dominated by the memory cost of storing full-rank weights, gradients, and optimizer states. Low-rank pre-training has emerged to address this, and the space of methods has grown rapidly. A central…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Namrata Shivagunde , Vijeta Deshpande , Sherin Muckatira , Anna Rumshisky

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

Supervised and preference-based fine-tuning techniques have become popular for aligning large language models (LLMs) with user intent and correctness criteria. However, real-world training data often exhibits spurious correlations --…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Julia Shuieh , Prasann Singhal , Apaar Shanker , John Heyer , George Pu , Samuel Denton

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

Traditional RL algorithms like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) typically train on the entire rollout buffer, operating under the assumption that all generated episodes provide a beneficial optimization signal. However, these episodes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Dong Shu , Denghui Zhang , Jessica Hullman

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

Post-training alignment of large language models (LLMs) is a critical challenge, as not all tokens contribute equally to model performance. This paper introduces a selective alignment strategy that prioritizes high-impact tokens within…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Zhijin Dong

The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) utilizes Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) for non-verifiable domains such as long-form question answering and open-ended instruction following. These domains often rely on LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Nirmal Patel , Fei Wang , Inderjit S. Dhillon

This study presents a systematic comparison of three Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms (PPO, GRPO, and DAPO) for improving complex reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Our main contribution is a controlled transfer-learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Yongsheng Lian

RL-based post-training with GRPO is widely used to improve large language models on individual reasoning tasks. However, real-world deployment requires reliable performance across diverse tasks. A straightforward multi-task adaptation of…

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

GRPO has emerged as a prominent reinforcement learning algorithm for post-training LLMs. Unlike critic-based methods, GRPO computes advantages by estimating the \emph{value baselines} from group-level statistics, eliminating the need for a…

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