arXiv:2606. 20008v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become a central tool for improving the reasoning ability of large language models, but current methods face a trade-off between simplicity and credit assignment.
By Zhewei Kang, Aosong Feng, Sergey Levine, Dawn Song, Xuandong Zhao
arXiv:2604.10701v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Credit assignment is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Classical actor-critic methods address this challenge through fine-g...
By Zikang Shan, Han Zhong, Liwei Wang, Li Zhao
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: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
arXiv:2608. 16739v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning algorithms for Large Language Models (LLMs) are largely distinguished by their variance reduction strategy.
By Siddarth Venkatraman, Matthieu Dinot, Laurence Aitchison
SIPO (Self‑Instructing Policy Optimization) unifies reinforcement learning with on‑policy self‑distillation by using a contrastive self‑teacher to generate token‑level credit signals. The method samples multiple rollouts per prompt, pairs each with a reference answer and its mistakes, and uses the difference in teacher log‑probabilities to provide dense feedback while still respecting the overall task reward. Experiments on reasoning and code‑generation benchmarks show that SIPO outperforms both RLVR and OPSD baselines without requiring an external teacher or extra generation steps.
By Zhenrui Yue, Huimin Zeng, Yueqi Wang, Yaokun Liu, Fengran Mo, Jinghan Zhang, Mung Yao Jia, Gyuseok Lee, Yang Zhang, Na Wei, Dong Wang
arXiv:2609.37119v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Recent approaches to reinforcement learning (RL) post-training for large language models increasingly remove the critic to reduce training instabilit...
By Hongyang Li, Xiao Li, Caesar Wu, Said Mammar, Gr\'egoire Danoy, Pascal Bouvry
Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) has become a critical stage in the post-training of large language models. Existing critic-free, group-relative methods estimate policy advantages from multiple rollouts, avoiding the substantial memory overhead of conventional proximal policy optimization (PPO) and achieving strong performance on long-horizon interactive tasks.
arXiv:2608. 19842v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) has become a critical stage in the post-training of large language models.
By Dayang Liang, Lang Feng, Bo An, Yunlong Liu
arXiv:2606. 25451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating token-level advantages in reinforcement learning (RL) for language models remains challenging because scaling up episodic experience collection is expensive.
By Fengdi Che, Yang Liu, Lei Yu, Meng Cao, Tong Che, Rupam Mahmood, Dale Schuurmans
arXiv:2608.23493v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Self-reflection is a powerful mechanism for credit assignment in human learning, converting sparse outcome feedback into actionable guidance. However,...
By Jialong Liu, Yuling Shi, Ning Yang, Xiaodong Gu, Zuchao Li
arXiv:2606. 01281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs).
By Yixiu Mao, Yun Qu, Qi Wang, Heming Zou, Xiangyang Ji