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Critic-free reinforcement learning methods, particularly group policies, have attracted considerable attention for their efficiency in complex tasks. However, these methods rely heavily on multiple sampling and comparisons within the policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Wenfeng Feng , Penghong Zhao , Guochao Jiang , Chuzhan Hao , Yuewei Zhang , Guohua Liu , Hao Wang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is increasingly viewed as a tree pruning mechanism. However, we identify a systemic pathology termed Recursive Space Contraction (RSC), an irreversible collapse driven by the combined…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Tianyi Wang , Long Li , Hongcan Guo , Yibiao Chen , Yixia Li , Yong Wang , Yun Chen , Guanhua Chen

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) offers a robust mechanism for enhancing mathematical reasoning in large models. However, we identify a systematic lack of emphasis on more challenging questions in existing methods from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Yanqi Dai , Yuxiang Ji , Xiao Zhang , Yong Wang , Xiangxiang Chu , Zhiwu Lu

Recent work on enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) has introduced explicit length control as a means of constraining computational cost while preserving accuracy. However, existing approaches rely on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud , Kumail Alhamoud , Abed Hammoud , Elie Bou-Zeid , Marzyeh Ghassemi , Bernard Ghanem

Policy optimization, which finds the desired policy by maximizing value functions via optimization techniques, lies at the heart of reinforcement learning (RL). In addition to value maximization, other practical considerations arise as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-12 Wenhao Zhan , Shicong Cen , Baihe Huang , Yuxin Chen , Jason D. Lee , Yuejie Chi

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

We investigate the usage of Large Language Model (LLM) in collecting high-quality data to warm-start Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for learning in some classical Markov Decision Process (MDP) environments. In this work, we focus on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Thang Duong , Minglai Yang , Chicheng Zhang

Group-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods have achieved remarkable success in improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) and have been rapidly extended to agentic tasks. However, their credit assignment relies heavily…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Xin Cheng , Shuo He , Lang Feng , HaiYang Xu , Ming Yan , Lei Feng , Bo An

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves LLM reasoning, yet growing evidence indicates an exploration ceiling: it often reweights existing solution traces rather than discovering new strategies, limiting gains under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Bizhe Bai , Xinyue Wang , Peng Ye , Tao Chen

We present Anchored Direct Preference Optimization (ADPO), a policy alignment method derived from first principles of KL-regularized reinforcement learning. Unlike standard approaches that treat the reference policy merely as a regularizer,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Wang Zixian

Process reward models (PRMs) allow for fine-grained credit assignment in reinforcement learning (RL), and seemingly contrast with outcome reward models (ORMs), which assign a single reward to an entire trajectory. However, we provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Michael Sullivan , Alexander Koller

We extend the Q-learner in Black-Scholes (QLBS) framework by incorporating risk aversion and trading costs, and propose a novel Replication Learning of Option Pricing (RLOP) approach. Both methods are fully compatible with standard…

Pricing of Securities · Quantitative Finance 2026-01-06 Ziheng Chen , Minxuan Hu , Jiayu Yi , Wenxi Sun

Aligning language models (LMs) with curated human feedback is critical to control their behaviors in real-world applications. Several recent policy optimization methods, such as DPO and SLiC, serve as promising alternatives to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Tianqi Liu , Zhen Qin , Junru Wu , Jiaming Shen , Misha Khalman , Rishabh Joshi , Yao Zhao , Mohammad Saleh , Simon Baumgartner , Jialu Liu , Peter J. Liu , Xuanhui Wang

Reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based regularization with respect to a fixed reference policy is widely used in modern reinforcement learning to preserve the desired traits of the reference policy and sometimes to promote…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Anupam Nayak , Tong Yang , Osman Yagan , Gauri Joshi , Yuejie Chi

On-policy reinforcement learning methods, like Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), often demand extensive data per update, leading to sample inefficiency. This paper introduces Reflective Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Yaozhong Gan , Renye Yan , Zhe Wu , Junliang Xing

Large Language Models (LLMs) generate functionally correct solutions but often fall short in code efficiency, a critical bottleneck for real-world deployment. In this paper, we introduce a novel test-time iterative optimization framework to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Mingzhe Du , Luu Anh Tuan , Yue Liu , Yuhao Qing , Dong Huang , Xinyi He , Qian Liu , Zejun Ma , See-kiong Ng

Large reasoning models (LRMs) are typically trained using reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) to enhance their reasoning abilities. In this paradigm, policies are updated using both positive and negative self-generated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Xinyu Tang , Yuliang Zhan , Zhixun Li , Wayne Xin Zhao , Zhenduo Zhang , Zujie Wen , Zhiqiang Zhang , Jun Zhou

This paper studies satisfaction of temporal properties on unknown stochastic processes that have continuous state spaces. We show how reinforcement learning (RL) can be applied for computing policies that are finite-memory and deterministic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-29 Milad Kazemi , Sadegh Soudjani

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly popular due to their ability to process and generate natural language. However, as they are trained on massive datasets of text, LLMs can inherit harmful biases and produce outputs that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Qi Gou , Cam-Tu Nguyen

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is an essential technique for ensuring that large language models (LLMs) are aligned with human values and preferences during the post-training phase. As an effective RLHF approach, group…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Zonglin Yang , Zhexuan Gu , Houduo Qi , Yancheng Yuan