arXiv Machine Learning

Policy Improvement Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2604. 00860v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a central post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models.

arXiv AI
1d ago

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 Machine Learning
Jun 2

Advantage Collapse in Group Relative Policy Optimization: Diagnosis and Mitigation

arXiv:2605. 21125v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a prominent algorithm within the Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) framework, has achieved strong results in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs).

By Xixiang He, Qiyao Sun, Ao Cheng, Xingming Li, Xuanyu Ji, Hailun Lu, Runke Huang, Qingyong Hu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

The Mirage of Optimizing Training Policies: Monotonic Inference Policies as the Real Objective for LLM Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 29526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained growing attention in large language model (LLM) post-training, yet RL training remains fragile and can suffer from instability or collapse.

By Jing Liang, Hongyao Tang, Yi Ma, Yancheng He, Weixun Wang, Xiaoyang Li, Ju Huang, Wenbo Su, Jinyi Liu, Yan Zheng, Jianye Hao, Bo Zheng
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

ConsensusBench: Benchmark of Consensus Nodes for LLM Reasoning via Outcome Reward Densifying

ConsensusBench is a new dataset that supplies rule‑based process‑level signals for large language model reasoning. It identifies key intermediate conclusions—called Consensus Nodes—by filtering correct trajectories and clustering semantically equivalent statements. By incorporating a process reward derived from these nodes into GRPO‑style reinforcement learning, the authors create ConsensusPR, which reduces reward sparsity and improves performance on benchmarks such as AIME, GSM8K, and MATH‑500.

By Shi-Qi Yan, Chao-Hong Tan, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Xiangang Li, Zhen-Hua Ling
arXiv AI
3d ago

SIPO: Unifying Reinforcement Learning with On-Policy Self-Distillation

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