English
Related papers

Related papers: OPPO: Bayesian Value Recursion for Token-Level Cre…

200 papers

Reinforcement learning with verifiable reward has recently emerged as a central paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs); however, prevailing mean-based methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Tao Ren , Jinyang Jiang , Hui Yang , Wan Tian , Minhao Zou , Guanghao Li , Zishi Zhang , Qinghao Wang , Shentao Qin , Yanjun Zhao , Rui Tao , Hui Shao , Yijie Peng

While policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) achieves tremendous successes in practice, it is significantly less understood in theory, especially compared with value-based RL. In particular, it remains elusive how to design a provably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Qi Cai , Zhuoran Yang , Chi Jin , Zhaoran Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), especially in scenarios where supervised fine-tuning (SFT) falls short due to limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Jian Xiong , Jingbo Zhou , Jingyong Ye , Qiang Huang , Dejing Dou

We propose Process-Aware Policy Optimization (PAPO), a method that integrates process-level evaluation into Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) through decoupled advantage normalization, to address two limitations of existing reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Zelin Tan , Zhouliang Yu , Bohan Lin , Zijie Geng , Hejia Geng , Yudong Zhang , Mulei Zhang , Yang Chen , Shuyue Hu , Zhenfei Yin , Chen Zhang , Lei Bai

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to long-context tasks requires post-training methods that remain accurate and coherent over thousands of tokens. Existing approaches are limited in several ways: 1) off-policy methods such as supervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Miguel Moura Ramos , Duarte M. Alves , André F. T. Martins

Group-advantage-based reinforcement learning methods, such as GRPO and DAPO, have demonstrated strong performance across diverse domains, including mathematical reasoning and text-to-image generation. However, their reliance on sample-level…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Shufan Li , Konstantinos Kallidromitis , Akash Gokul Yusuke Kato , Kazuki Kozuka , Aditya Grover

Test-time policy optimization enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to distribution shifts by leveraging feedback from self-generated rollouts. However, existing methods rely on fixed-budget majority voting to estimate rewards,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Youkang Wang , Jian Wang , Rubing Chen , Tianyi Zeng , Xiao-Yong Wei , Qing Li

Lead optimization in drug discovery requires efficiently navigating vast chemical space through iterative cycles to enhance molecular properties while preserving structural similarity to the original lead compound. Despite recent advances,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Ziqing Wang , Yibo Wen , William Pattie , Xiao Luo , Weimin Wu , Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu , Abhishek Pandey , Han Liu , Kaize Ding

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has significantly advanced the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), particularly in their mathemat ical reasoning performance. However, GRPO and related entropy regularization methods…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Xingyu Lin , Yilin Wen , Du Su , Jinchang Hou , En Wang , Wenbin Liu , Chenfu Bao , Zhonghou Lv

On-policy distillation (OPD) is increasingly used in LLM post-training because it can leverage a teacher model to provide dense supervision on student rollouts. The standard implementation, however, usually reduces distribution matching to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Yuqian Fu , Haohuan Huang , Kaiwen Jiang , Jiacai Liu , Zhuo Jiang , Yuanheng Zhu , Dongbin Zhao

When a model produces a correct solution under reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), every token receives the same reward signal regardless of whether it was a decisive reasoning step or a grammatical filler. A natural fix…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Ahmed Heakl , Abdelrahman M. Shaker , Youssef Mohamed , Rania Elbadry , Omar Fetouh , Fahad Shahbaz Khan , Salman Khan

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a promising paradigm for scaling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the sparsity of binary verifier rewards often leads to low efficiency and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Shuo Yang , Jinda Lu , Kexin Huang , Chiyu Ma , Shaohang Wei , Yuyang Liu , Guoyin Wang , Jingren Zhou , Li Yuan

Existing LLM-based policy optimizers see only scalar rewards: that a policy scored 0.45, but not whether the agent got stuck in a loop, fell into a hole on the third step, or performed well on 19 out of 20 rollouts and failed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Rahaf Abu Hara , Vaibbhav Murarri , Claudio Zito

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for post-training large language models. While Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely adopted, its coarse credit assignment uniformly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Gengsheng Li , Tianyu Yang , Junfeng Fang , Mingyang Song , Mao Zheng , Haiyun Guo , Dan Zhang , Jinqiao Wang , Tat-Seng Chua

We present Future-KL Influenced Policy Optimization (FIPO), a reinforcement learning algorithm designed to overcome reasoning bottlenecks in large language models. While GRPO style training scales effectively, it typically relies on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Chiyu Ma , Shuo Yang , Kexin Huang , Jinda Lu , Haoming Meng , Shangshang Wang , Bolin Ding , Soroush Vosoughi , Guoyin Wang , Jingren Zhou

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Youssef Mroueh

Recent advancements in large language model alignment leverage token-level supervisions to perform fine-grained preference optimization. However, existing token-level alignment methods either optimize on all available tokens, which can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Kailai Yang , Zhiwei Liu , Qianqian Xie , Jimin Huang , Erxue Min , Sophia Ananiadou

Large language models trained with reinforcement learning (RL) for mathematical reasoning face a fundamental challenge: on problems the model cannot solve at all - "cliff" prompts - the RL gradient vanishes entirely, preventing any learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Ken Ding

We study a common challenge in reinforcement learning for large language models (LLMs): the Zero-Reward Assumption, where non-terminal actions (i.e., intermediate token generations) receive zero task-specific immediate reward, while only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Shenghua He , Tian Xia , Xuan Zhou , Hui Wei

Contemporary reinforcement learning with verifiable reward methods post-train language models on multi-step reasoning by assigning a single outcome reward uniformly across all tokens in a trajectory. Such uniform assignment ignores which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Ankur Samanta , Akshayaa Magesh , Ayush Jain , Youliang Yu , Daniel Jiang , Kavosh Asadi , Kaveh Hassani , Paul Sajda , Jalaj Bhandari , Yonathan Efroni