arXiv Machine Learning

Learning from the Right Rollouts: Data Attribution for PPO-based LLM Post-Training

The paper introduces Influence‑Guided PPO (I‑PPO), a framework that incorporates data attribution into the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) post‑training loop for large language models. I‑PPO computes an influence score for each episode via a gradient‑based approximation and removes episodes that are anti‑aligned with a validation gradient, thereby filtering out noisy or unfaithful reasoning. Experiments show that this filtering consistently outperforms both supervised fine‑tuning (SFT) and standard PPO, acting as an intrinsic early‑stopping mechanism that speeds up training and reduces unfaithful chain‑of‑thought reasoning.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Unleashing Implicit Rewards: Prefix-Value Learning for Distribution-Level Optimization

The paper introduces the Implicit Prefix-Value Reward Model (IPVRM), which learns the probability of eventual correctness for each prefix directly from outcome labels, thereby aligning training targets with inference-time step signals via temporal-difference differences. IPVRM improves step-verification F1 on ProcessBench. Additionally, the authors propose Distribution-Level RL (DistRL), a policy optimization method that applies TD advantages to both sampled and high-probability tokens, offering dense counterfactual updates without extra rollouts, and show that DistRL consistently enhances downstream reasoning when combined with IPVRM.

By Shiping Gao, Hongzhan Chen, Xiaojun Quan, Qifan Wang, Lifu Huang
arXiv AI
Oct 15

Learning with a Single Rollout via Pass@k Policy Optimization

The paper introduces Single‑Rollout Pass@k Policy Optimization (SR‑PPO), a reinforcement learning method that uses only one rollout per prompt to train language‑model agents. SR‑PPO combines Monte Carlo token‑level advantage estimation with Pass@k gradient reweighting and an online critic for baseline and weight estimation. Experiments show that SR‑PPO achieves stable learning and performance comparable to traditional Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on reasoning and logic benchmarks, even when off‑policy drift degrades standard Pass@1 PPO.

By Fengdi Che, Yang Liu, Lei Yu, Meng Cao, Tong Che, Rupam Mahmood, Dale Schuurmans
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

RollVerify: Bridging Efficiency and Accuracy in Long-Tail Rollout Reinforcement Learning

RollVerify is a lightweight reinforcement learning framework that addresses the trade‑off between efficiency and accuracy in long‑tail rollout settings. It introduces an off‑policy shift metric (OPS) to quantify deviation in partially generated trajectories and uses sequence‑level and token‑level verification to truncate invalid suffixes before training. Experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks show that RollVerify matches on‑policy accuracy while cutting training costs, with preliminary evidence from code‑generation tasks.

By Yongqiang Yao, Jinru Tan, Kaihuan Liang, Zixin Yin, Yazhe Niu, Ruihao Gong, Dahua Lin, Ningyi Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

Implicit Actor Critic Coupling via a Supervised Learning Framework for RLVR

arXiv:2509. 02522v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have empowered large language models (LLMs) to tackle challenging reasoning tasks such as mathematics and programming, however existing RLVR methods often suffer from sparse reward signals and unstable policy gradient updates inherent to RL-based approaches.

By Jiaming Li, Longze Chen, Ze Gong, Yukun Chen, Lu Wang, Wanwei He, Run Luo, Min Yang