Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) stalls on a model's hardest problems: when no rollout in a group succeeds, the group-relative advantages vanish and the problem contributes no gradient, wasting the frontier examples we most want to learn from. Prepending a correct prefix of a reference solution raises the success rate, making prefix length a continuous knob on difficulty.
arXiv:2607. 00152v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Three of the most popular methods for training language models to reason look like three different tricks.
By Yong Yi Bay, Kathleen A. Yearick
arXiv:2601. 03895v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a popular algorithm for reinforcement learning with large language models (LLMs).
By Chi Liu, Xin Chen
arXiv:2607. 19313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves reasoning in large language models.
By Priyank Agrawal, Ankur Samanta, Shervin Ghasemlou, Jalaj Bhandari, Kavosh Asadi, Daniel Jiang, Aditya Modi
arXiv:2607. 18163v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: PPO and the GRPO baseline studied here use clipped surrogate objectives whose favorable-direction saturation introduces an abrupt change in the scalar objective's derivative.
By Chinmay Rane, Kanishka Tyagi, Michael Manry
arXiv:2606. 04560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards with GRPO is a standard approach for post-training reasoning LLMs.
By Gyeongtae Yoo, Sanghyeok Park, Soohyuk Jang, Ik-hwan Kim, Sungroh Yoon
arXiv:2606. 16733v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Policy gradient algorithms for language models optimize the same objective $J(\theta) = \mathbb{E}*{\tau \sim p*\theta(\tau)}[R(\tau)]$, which has exactly two factors: the trajectory probability $p_\theta(\tau)$ and the reward $R(\tau)$.
By Jianghan Shen, Siqi Luo, Yue Li, Jiyao Liu, Wanying Qu, Yi Zhang, Ziyan Huang, Tianbin Li, Ming Hu, Xiaohong Liu, Yirong Chen, Junjun He
arXiv:2604. 01499v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evolution Strategies (ES) have emerged as a scalable gradient-free alternative to reinforcement learning based LLM fine-tuning, but it remains unclear whether comparable task performance implies comparable solutions in parameter space.
By William Hoy, Binxu Wang, Xu Pan
arXiv:2605. 17314v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider whether off-policy experience from a smaller, weaker model can elicit capability in a stronger learner that on-policy RL fine-tuning (e.
By Wei Deng
arXiv:2607. 12640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in particular, is now run routinely on a supervised checkpoint in the hope of producing a stronger agent.
By Chengguang Gan, Zhixi Cai, Yunhao Liang, Hanjun Wei, Shiwen Ni, Qinghao Zhang
arXiv:2606. 30789v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become a standard tool for improving the reasoning ability of large language models, yet its training dynamics are still described empirically: reward trajectories are fit with low-parameter functional forms whose constants carry no mechanistic meaning, and hyperparameter choices remain a matter of trial and error.
By Rajat Ghosh, Datta Nimmaturi, Aryan Singhal, Vaishnavi Bhargava, Henry Wong, Johnu George, Debojyoti Dutta
arXiv:2608. 12957v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) learns from reward differences within a rollout group, but receives no useful relative signal when every sampled response is incorrect.
By Yubo Zhang, Xinhong Ma, Zezhong Tan, Ziqiang Dong