arXiv AI

When All Rollouts Fail: Policy-Compatible Joint Decoding for Hard-Problem Reasoning

The paper introduces Policy-Compatible Reinforcement Learning (PICO), a method that addresses the learning cliff in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) by performing distribution-constrained joint decoding. PICO guides token-level decoding with expert data while preserving the model’s token probabilities, and uses a dynamic top‑k mechanism to keep sampling within a finite divergence budget. The resulting trajectories are verified and policy‑compatible, and are jointly optimized with on‑policy rollouts using a mixed‑behavior objective that mitigates distribution mismatch via importance sampling, leading to consistent performance gains over standard RLVR and prior off‑policy baselines on diverse reasoning datasets and agentic benchmarks.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Oct 27

When All Rollouts Fail: Policy-Compatible Joint Decoding for Hard-Problem Reasoning

The paper introduces Policy-Compatible Reinforcement Learning (PICO), a method that combines distribution-constrained joint decoding with on-policy rollouts to address the learning cliff in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). PICO guides token-level decoding using expert data while preserving the model’s relative token probabilities, and employs a dynamic top‑k mechanism to keep sampling within a finite divergence budget. This approach yields verified, policy‑compatible trajectories that are jointly optimized with on‑policy rollouts, leading to consistent performance gains over standard RLVR and prior off‑policy baselines across diverse reasoning datasets and agentic benchmarks.

arXiv AI
Oct 15

DyJR: Preserving Diversity in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards via Dynamic Jensen-Shannon Replay

arXiv:2603.16157v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Reinforcement Learning (RL) enhances Large Language Model reasoning, on-policy algorithms like GRPO are sample-inefficient as they disc...

By Long Li, Zhijian Zhou, Tianyi Wang, Weidi Xu, Zuming Huang, Wei Chu, Zhe Wang, Shirui Pan, Chao Qu, Yuan Qi
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 9

CLPO: Curriculum Learning meets Policy Optimization for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2509. 25004v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become an effective paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models, but most methods still optimize reasoning trajectories over the static problem set, wasting rollout budget on solved or overly difficult problems.

By Shijie Zhang, Zheng Xiao, Shiyu Liu, Guohao Sun, Kevin Zhang, Xiang Guo, Rujun Guo, Shaoyu Liu, Wangxiao Zhao, Guanjun Jiang
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