Reinforcement learning for large language models (LLMs) typically relies on trust-region masks to stabilize off-policy updates. The dominant PPO-style approach uses the sampled-token importance ratio for two criteria: a proximity criterion, which asks whether the policy has moved too far from the behavior policy, and a direction criterion, which asks whether the update pushes it farther away.
arXiv:2606. 09821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key component of post-training large language models (LLMs).
By Jiarui Yao, Xiangxin Zhou, Penghui Qi, Wee Sun Lee, Liefeng Bo, Tianyu Pang
arXiv:2602. 04879v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm.
By Penghui Qi, Xiangxin Zhou, Zichen Liu, Tianyu Pang, Chao Du, Min Lin, Wee Sun Lee
arXiv:2512. 23075v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Policy gradient methods for Large Language Models optimize a policy $\pi_\theta$ via a surrogate objective computed from samples of a rollout policy $\pi_{\text{roll}}$.
By Yingru Li, Jiacai Liu, Jiawei Xu, Yuxuan Tong, Ziniu Li, Qian Liu, Baoxiang Wang
arXiv:2607. 04728v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training for large language models (LLMs) follows a efficient paradigm of "rollout then update", which inevitably results in off-policy training data.
By Yu Li, Xiuyu Li, Mingyang Yi, Jiaxing Wang, zhangliangxu, Zhaolong Xing, Zhen Chen
arXiv:2606.22570v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising framework for enhancing the reasoning ability of large language mo...
By Peidong Wang, Demi Wang, Xufang Luo, Jiahang Xu, Xiaocui Yang, Shi Feng, Yuqing Yang, Dongsheng Li
arXiv:2602. 18037v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) or Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) are two key steps in the post-training of modern Language Models (LMs).
By Johannes Ackermann, Michael Noukhovitch, Takashi Ishida, Masashi Sugiyama
arXiv:2606. 31575v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a powerful tool for propelling Large Language Models (LLMs) beyond imitation-based training towards more robust reasoning capabilities.
By Outongyi Lv, Yanzhao Zheng, Yuanwei Zhang, Zhenghao Huang, Xingjun Wang, Baohua Dong, Hangcheng Zhu, Yingda Chen
arXiv:2606. 10968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become standard for improving LLM reasoning.
By Renjie Mao, Xiangxin Zhou, Lvfang Tao, Yixin Ding, Yu Shi, Yongguang Lin, Yuheng Wu, Honglin Zhu, Qian Qiu, Wenxi Zhu
Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training for large language models (LLMs) follows a efficient paradigm of "rollout then update", which inevitably results in off-policy training data. To resolve this, Importance sampling (IS) is proposed, while the token-level ratios compound over long sequences, causing severe variance exploded.
arXiv:2609.36262v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recent studies have observed that parameter changes during language-model post-training can be concentrated in a small subset of coordinates. This phen...
By Yufan Zhang, Sagnik Mukherjee, Hao Peng
The paper investigates why Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) benefits from per‑prompt normalization by examining the local curvature of the sequence‑level policy gradient. It shows that standard deviation normalization acts as an adaptive gradient, yielding a provably faster convergence rate than unnormalized REINFORCE under mild conditions, with the improvement tied to the average within‑prompt reward standard deviation. The authors also propose IS‑GRPO, an importance‑sampling variant that maintains alignment with the full gradient and offers a tighter convergence guarantee, and empirically validate these theoretical insights on GSM8K and MATH datasets at 1.5B and 7B model scales.
By Cheng Ge, Caitlyn Heqi Yin, Hao Liang, Jiawei Zhang