English
Related papers

Related papers: Rethinking Importance Sampling in LLM Policy Optim…

200 papers

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become central to enhancing reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Yet on-policy algorithms such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) often suffer in early training: noisy gradients from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Ziyan Wang , Zheng Wang , Xingwei Qu , Qi Cheng , Jie Fu , Shengpu Tang , Minjia Zhang , Xiaoming Huo

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) significantly enhances the reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, this success heavily relies on expensive external verifiers or human rules. Such dependency not only leads…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Nonghai Zhang , Weitao Ma , Zhanyu Ma , Jun Xu , Jiuchong Gao , Jinghua Hao , Renqing He , Jingwen Xu

Large Language Models (LLMs) can self-improve through reinforcement learning, where they generate trajectories to explore and discover better solutions. However, this exploration process is computationally expensive, often forcing current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Ziniu Li , Congliang Chen , Tianyun Yang , Tian Ding , Ruoyu Sun , Ge Zhang , Wenhao Huang , Zhi-Quan Luo

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely used for critic-free Large Language Model (LLM) post-training, but its KL regularization is usually implemented as a local loss-side token penalty. We show that this misses the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jiarui Yao , Ruida Wang , Hao Bai , Tong Zhang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been used to finetune Large Language Models (LLMs) using a reward model trained from preference data, to better align with human judgment. The recently introduced direct alignment methods, which are often…

Reinforcement learning has significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex problem-solving tasks. Recently, the introduction of DeepSeek R1 has inspired a surge of interest in leveraging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Jinghang Han , Jiawei Chen , Hang Shao , Hao Ma , Mingcheng Li , Xintian Shen , Lihao Zheng , Wei Chen , Tao Wei , Lihua Zhang

Critic-free methods like GRPO reduce memory demands by estimating advantages from multiple rollouts but tend to converge slowly, as critical learning signals are diluted by an abundance of uninformative samples and tokens. To tackle this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Chao Wang , Tao Yang , Hongtao Tian , Yunsheng Shi , Qiyao Ma , Xiaotao Liu , Ting Yao , Wenbo Ding

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,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Mukai Li , Qingcheng Zeng , Tianqing Fang , Zhenwen Liang , Linfeng Song , Qi Liu , Haitao Mi , Dong Yu

This work studies reinforcement learning (RL) in the context of multi-period supply chains subject to constraints, e.g., on production and inventory. We introduce Distributional Constrained Policy Optimization (DCPO), a novel approach for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jaime Sabal Bermúdez , Antonio del Rio Chanona , Calvin Tsay

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

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has catalyzed a leap in Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, yet its optimization dynamics remain fragile. Standard algorithms like GRPO enforce stability via "hard clipping", which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Xiaoliang Fu , Jiaye Lin , Yangyi Fang , Chaowen Hu , Cong Qin , Zekai Shao , Binbin Zheng , Lu Pan , Ke Zeng

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

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has shown notable effectiveness in enhancing large language models (LLMs) reasoning performance, especially in mathematics tasks. However, such improvements often come with reduced outcome…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Chenyi Li , Yuan Zhang , Bo Wang , Guoqing Ma , Wei Tang , Haoyang Huang , Nan Duan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) enhances LLM reasoning, yet a paradox emerges as models scale: strong base models saturate standard benchmarks (e.g., MATH), yielding correct but homogeneous solutions. In such environments, the lack of failure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Zhenwen Liang , Yujun Zhou , Sidi Lu , Xiangliang Zhang , Haitao Mi , Dong Yu

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, existing methods suffer from an exploration dilemma: the sharply peaked initial…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yuhua Jiang , Jiawei Huang , Yufeng Yuan , Xin Mao , Yu Yue , Qianchuan Zhao , Lin Yan

Query generation is a critical task for web search engines (e.g. Google, Bing) and recommendation systems. Recently, state-of-the-art query generation methods leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) for their strong capabilities in context…

Reinforcement learning for multi-step reasoning with large language models (LLMs) typically relies on sparse terminal rewards, which creates a poorly conditioned credit-assignment problem: the final feedback is propagated uniformly across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Fei Ding , Yongkang Zhang , youwei wang , Zijian Zeng

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Han Zhou , Xingchen Wan , Ivan Vulić , Anna Korhonen

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become the leading approach for fine-tuning large language models (LLM). However, RLHF has limitations in multi-task learning (MTL) due to challenges of reward hacking and extreme…

Search agents extend Large Language Models (LLMs) beyond static parametric knowledge by enabling access to up-to-date and long-tail information unavailable during pretraining. While reinforcement learning has been widely adopted for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Junzhe Wang , Zhiheng Xi , Yajie Yang , Hao Luo , Shihan Dou , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang