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Online reinforcement learning is becoming increasingly important for aligning diffusion models with non-differentiable objectives. However, existing methods still face limitations in assigning fine-grained credit along denoising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zhengyang Liang , Qihang Zhang , Ceyuan Yang

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Meng Cao , Lei Shu , Lei Yu , Yun Zhu , Nevan Wichers , Yinxiao Liu , Lei Meng

Recent advancements in reasoning-focused language models such as OpenAI's O1 and DeepSeek-R1 have shown that scaling test-time computation-through chain-of-thought reasoning and iterative exploration-can yield substantial improvements on…

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has gained increasing attention in control engineering. Especially, policy gradient methods are widely used. In this work, we improve the tracking performance of proximal policy optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-21 Jana Mayer , Johannes Westermann , Juan Pedro Gutiérrez H. Muriedas , Uwe Mettin , Alexander Lampe

Generative speech enhancement offers a promising alternative to traditional discriminative methods by modeling the distribution of clean speech conditioned on noisy inputs. Post-training alignment via reinforcement learning (RL) effectively…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-26 Haoxu Wang , Biao Tian , Yiheng Jiang , Zexu Pan , Shengkui Zhao , Bin Ma , Daren Chen , Xiangang Li

We show that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can elicit strong mathematical reasoning in certain language models even with spurious rewards that have little, no, or even negative correlation with the correct answer.…

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a scalable alternative to Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) by eliminating the learned critic and instead estimating advantages through group-relative comparisons of trajectories.…

Training robust and generalizable reward models for human visual preferences is essential for aligning text-to-image and text-to-video generative models with human intent. However, current reward models often fail to generalize, and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Alexander Gambashidze , Li Pengyi , Matvey Skripkin , Andrey Galichin , Anton Gusarov , Konstantin Sobolev , Andrey Kuznetsov , Ivan Oseledets

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms update an agent's parameters according to one of several possible rules, discovered manually through years of research. Automating the discovery of update rules from data could lead to more efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-06 Junhyuk Oh , Matteo Hessel , Wojciech M. Czarnecki , Zhongwen Xu , Hado van Hasselt , Satinder Singh , David Silver

Reinforcement learning is a framework for learning to act sequentially in an unknown environment. We propose a natural approach for modeling policy structure in policy gradients. The key idea is to optimize for a subset of future rewards:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Puneet Mathur , Branislav Kveton , Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Viet Dac Lai

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been witnessed its potential for training a dialogue policy agent towards maximizing the accumulated rewards given from users. However, the reward can be very sparse for it is usually only provided at the end…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Hongru Wang , Huimin Wang , Zezhong Wang , Kam-Fai Wong

Prevalent reinforcement learning~(RL) methods for fine-tuning LLM reasoners, such as GRPO or Leave-one-out PPO, abandon the learned value function in favor of empirically estimated returns. This hinders test-time compute scaling that relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Kusha Sareen , Morgane M Moss , Alessandro Sordoni , Rishabh Agarwal , Arian Hosseini

Recent advancements in post-training methodologies for large language models (LLMs) have highlighted reinforcement learning (RL) as a critical component for enhancing reasoning. However, the substantial computational costs associated with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Songjun Tu , Jiahao Lin , Xiangyu Tian , Qichao Zhang , Linjing Li , Yuqian Fu , Nan Xu , Wei He , Xiangyuan Lan , Dongmei Jiang , Dongbin Zhao

Reinforcement learning (RL) for LLM post-training faces a fundamental design choice: whether to use a learned critic as a baseline for policy optimization. Classical theory favors critic-based methods such as PPO for variance reduction, yet…

From a first-principles perspective, it may seem odd that the strongest results in foundation model fine-tuning (FT) are achieved via a relatively complex, two-stage training procedure. Specifically, one first trains a reward model (RM) on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Gokul Swamy , Sanjiban Choudhury , Wen Sun , Zhiwei Steven Wu , J. Andrew Bagnell

We deploy large language models (LLMs) as business development (BD) agents for persuasive price negotiation in online travel agencies (OTAs). The agent must follow a multi-stage Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and strict guardrails (no…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Xia Zeng , Yihan Chen , Luhui Liu , Chao Luo , Ye Chen , Zhuoran Zhuang

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

The enhancement of reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs) has garnered significant attention, with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning emerging as dominant paradigms. While recent studies recognize the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Zhijie Wang

Reinforcement learning based post-training of large language models (LLMs) has recently gained attention, particularly following the release of DeepSeek R1, which applied GRPO for fine-tuning. Amid the growing claims around improved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Soumya Rani Samineni , Durgesh Kalwar , Karthik Valmeekam , Kaya Stechly , Subbarao Kambhampati

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