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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

Moving beyond simple scalar rewards toward richer world feedback is a natural path to more scalable RL post-training. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is a promising recent approach that uses arbitrary feedback as learning signal, yet its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Tommy He , Jerome Sieber , Matteo Saponati

Tremendous progress has been made in reinforcement learning (RL) over the past decade. Most of these advancements came through the continual development of new algorithms, which were designed using a combination of mathematical derivations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Chris Lu , Jakub Grudzien Kuba , Alistair Letcher , Luke Metz , Christian Schroeder de Witt , Jakob Foerster

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

In this paper, we study offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), where learning is based on pre-collected preference feedback over pairs of trajectories. While offline PbRL has demonstrated remarkable empirical success,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Hyungkyu Kang , Min-hwan Oh

Recent advances in large language models have highlighted the critical need for precise control over model outputs through predefined constraints. While existing methods attempt to achieve this through either direct instruction-response…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Zhouhong Gu , Xingzhou Chen , Xiaoran Shi , Tao Wang , Suhang Zheng , Tianyu Li , Hongwei Feng , Yanghua Xiao

Few-step diffusion models enable efficient high-resolution image synthesis but struggle to align with specific downstream objectives due to limitations of existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods in low-step regimes with limited state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Ziyi Zhang , Li Shen , Sen Zhang , Deheng Ye , Yong Luo , Miaojing Shi , Dongjing Shan , Bo Du , Dacheng Tao

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising framework for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, existing approaches such as GRPO often suffer from zero gradients. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Shihui Yang , Chengfeng Dou , Peidong Guo , Kai Lu , Qiang Ju , Fei Deng , Rihui Xin

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) policies often fail under dynamics that differ from training, a gap not fully addressed by domain randomization or existing adversarial RL methods. Distributionally robust RL provides a formal remedy but still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Mintae Kim , Koushil Sreenath

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) guides large language models (LLMs) to generate recommendations aligned with user historical behavior distributions by minimizing preference alignment loss. However, our systematic empirical research and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Chu Zhao , Enneng Yang , Jianzhe Zhao , Guibing Guo

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

Provably efficient Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) based on optimism or posterior sampling (PSRL) is ensured to attain the global optimality asymptotically by introducing the complexity measure of the model. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Shenao Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising method to solve control problems. However, model-free RL algorithms are sample inefficient and require thousands if not millions of samples to learn optimal control policies. A major source of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-31 Atish Dixit , Ahmed Elsheikh

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) highlight the importance of post training techniques for improving reasoning and mathematical ability. Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has shown promise in this domain by combining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Gabriele Carrino , Andrea Sassella , Nicolo Brunello , Federico Toschi , Mark James Carman

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in solving complex mathematical problems, yet they still fall short of producing accurate and consistent solutions. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a framework for aligning these models with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ali Hatamizadeh , Shrimai Prabhumoye , Igor Gitman , Ximing Lu , Seungju Han , Wei Ping , Yejin Choi , Jan Kautz

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown extraordinary potential in aligning diffusion models to downstream tasks, yet most of them still suffer from significant reward hacking, which degrades generative diversity and quality by inducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Jiaming Li , Chenyu Zhu , Nanxi Yi , Youjun Bao , Li Sun , Quanying Lv , Xiang Fang , Daizong Liu , Jianjun Li , Kun He , Bowen Zhou , Zhiyuan Ma

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) improves the alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values by training directly on human preference datasets, eliminating the need for reward models. However, due to the presence of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Biqing Qi , Pengfei Li , Fangyuan Li , Junqi Gao , Kaiyan Zhang , Bowen Zhou

Generative models have emerged as a powerful class of policies for offline reinforcement learning (RL) due to their ability to capture complex, multi-modal behaviors. However, existing methods face a stark trade-off: slow, iterative models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Xinsong Feng , Leshu Tang , Chenan Wang , Haipeng Chen

We study episodic reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary linear kernel Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this setting, both the reward function and the transition kernel are linear with respect to the given feature maps and are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Han Zhong , Zhongren Chen , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Csaba Szepesvári