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Option-critic learning is a general-purpose reinforcement learning (RL) framework that aims to address the issue of long term credit assignment by leveraging temporal abstractions. However, when dealing with extended timescales, discounting…

Reinforcement learning, including reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), has emerged as a powerful approach for LLM post-training. Central to these approaches is the design of the importance sampling (IS) ratio used in…

This thesis develops theoretical frameworks and algorithms that advance constrained reinforcement learning (RL) across control, preference learning, and alignment of large language models. The first contribution addresses constrained Markov…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has advanced the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs), enabling autonomous agents that can conduct effective multi-turn and tool-integrated reasoning. While instructions…

As large language model agents tackle increasingly complex long-horizon tasks, effective post-training becomes critical. Prior work faces fundamental challenges: outcome-only rewards fail to precisely attribute credit to intermediate steps,…

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can significantly enhance reasoning abilities by directly optimizing correctness, rather than relying solely on…

The success of Deepseek-R1 has drawn the LLM community's attention to reinforcement learning (RL) methods like GRPO. However, such rule-based 0/1 outcome reward methods lack the capability to regulate the intermediate reasoning processes…

Process Reinforcement Learning~(PRL) has demonstrated considerable potential in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models~(LLMs). However, introducing additional process reward models incurs substantial computational…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven to be a highly effective strategy for endowing Large Language Models (LLMs) with robust multi-step reasoning abilities. However, its design and optimizations remain tailored…

Policy optimization for large language models often suffers from sparse reward signals in multi-step reasoning tasks. Critic-free methods like GRPO assign a single normalized outcome reward to all tokens, providing limited guidance for…

Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO) enhances large language models by estimating advantages across a group of sampled trajectories. However, mapping these trajectory-level advantages to policy updates requires aggregating token-level…

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences typically relies on external supervision, which faces critical limitations: human annotations are scarce and subjective, reward models are vulnerable to reward hacking, and…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the careful design of the reward function. However, accurately assigning rewards to each state-action pair in Long-Term Reinforcement Learning (LTRL) tasks remains a significant challenge. As a…

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) was introduced and used recently for promoting reasoning in LLMs under verifiable (binary) rewards. We show that the mean + variance calibration of these rewards induces a weighted contrastive loss…

Standard reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) trains a reward model on pairwise preference data and then uses it for policy optimization. However, while reward models are optimized to capture relative preferences, existing…

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…

Recent Progress in post-training flow matching for text-to-image (T2I) generation with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has demonstrated strong potential. However, it is hindered by a critical limitation: inaccurate advantage…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR)-based post-training of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been shown to improve accuracy on reasoning tasks and continues to attract significant attention. Existing RLVR methods, however,…

The Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a reinforcement learning method used to fine-tune large language models (LLMs), has proved its effectiveness in practical applications such as DeepSeek-R1. It raises a question whether GRPO can…

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a powerful technique for aligning generative models, but its effectiveness is bottlenecked by the conflict between large group sizes and prohibitive computational costs. In this work, we…