arXiv Machine Learning

StaRPO: Stability-Augmented Reinforcement Policy Optimization

StaRPO is a stability‑augmented reinforcement learning framework that enhances large language models’ reasoning by incorporating two lightweight stability metrics—Autocorrelation Function (ACF) for local step‑to‑step coherence and Path Efficiency (PE) for global goal‑directedness—into the optimization objective. By combining these stability rewards with task rewards, StaRPO provides process‑aware feedback that reduces logical inconsistencies, structural erraticism, and redundancy in generated responses. Experiments on four reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that StaRPO consistently outperforms baseline methods, improving both final‑answer accuracy and logical stability.

arXiv AI
Oct 2

Your Language Model is Its Own Critic: Reinforcement Learning with Value Estimation from Actor's Internal States

The paper introduces POISE, a reinforcement learning algorithm that uses a model’s internal states as a value estimator to reduce variance in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). By employing a lightweight probe that reads internal signals during the forward pass, POISE predicts baselines online and uses a cross‑rollout construction to keep gradients unbiased. Experiments on Qwen3‑4B and OLMo3‑7B‑Instruct‑DPO across six domains show POISE outperforms existing RLVR baselines, offering more stable training and a value model that generalizes across tasks and scales with the policy.

By Yunho Choi, Jongwon Lim, Woojin Ahn, Minjae Oh, Jeonghoon Shim, Yohan Jo
arXiv AI
Jun 16

STRIDE: Strategic Trajectory Reasoning via Discriminative Estimation for Verifiable Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 15866v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become an effective post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models.

By Qinjian Zhao, Zhihao Dou, Dinggen Zhang, Xiangyu Li, Chaoda Song, Zhongwei Wan, Xinpeng Li, Yanyan Zhang, Kaijie Chen, Qingtao Pan, Chengcheng Feng, Zhiqiang Gao, Xiaoyu Xia
arXiv AI
3d ago

TrajEvolve: Trajectory Evolution for Reinforcement Learning with Hindsight Credit Assignment

TrajEvolve introduces a trajectory evolution paradigm with hindsight credit assignment to improve reinforcement learning for large language models on long-horizon tasks. It refines low-quality steps in historical trajectories to expose the policy to high-quality compositions that are rarely sampled, and reformulates step-level continuous credit assignment as a binary classification problem to identify redundant steps. Experiments on two datasets show that this approach outperforms existing methods.

By Yi Wen, Hao Chen, Wanyu Wang, Maolin Wang, Pengyue Jia, Derong Xu, Huize Tan, Yingyi Zhang, Wenlin Zhang, Weihong Luo, Xiku Du, Xiangyu Zhao
arXiv AI
Oct 7

Rationale-Guided Policy Optimization: Learning to Reason with Adaptive Rationale Scaffolding

Rationale-Guided Policy Optimization (RGPO) is a reinforcement‑learning framework that adaptively uses ground‑truth rationale information to scaffold a language model’s reasoning process. Instead of treating reference solutions as fixed imitation targets, RGPO temporarily incorporates rationales to help the model generate better responses, then reverts to unguided learning with higher‑reward, model‑generated solutions. Experiments in both language‑only and vision‑language tasks show that RGPO consistently outperforms RLVR baselines, with ablation studies confirming that adaptive rationale guidance is a key factor in its success.

By Hoang Phan, Minh Pham, Chau Pham, Chinmay Hegde, Trung Le, Qi Lei