Hugging Face Trending Papers

Beyond the Stability-Exploration Dilemma: Environmental Regularization for LLM Policy Optimization

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Beyond the Stability-Exploration Dilemma: Environmental Regularization for LLM Policy Optimization

arXiv:2608.23311v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Policy optimization (PO) for Large Language Models faces a stability--exploration trade-off, currently mediated by an action-side Policy-KL regularizer...

By Xianlei Zhou, Xiangdi Meng, Yu He, Tianyu Qi, Shuyan Guan, Xianli Zhang, Jian Zhang, Xin Li, Qika Lin, Jun Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Extreme Region Policy Distillation

arXiv:2605. 25582v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning for large language models faces a fundamental trade-off between sample efficiency and asymptotic performance: strictly on-policy methods discard trajectories after a single update, while off-policy reuse introduces distribution mismatch that existing trust-region techniques mitigate primarily by enforcing conservative optimization, often leaving rich training signals underutilized.

By Changyu Chen, Xiting Wang, Rui Yan
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

A Comedy of Estimators: On KL Regularization in RL Training of LLMs

The paper investigates how different estimators of the reverse Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence used as a regularization term in reinforcement learning (RL) training of large language models (LLMs) affect training stability and downstream performance. By analyzing gradient bias across various estimator configurations, the authors demonstrate that biased gradients can cause training instabilities, while unbiased configurations improve performance on both in‑domain and out‑of‑domain tasks. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑7B, Llama‑3.1‑8B‑Instruct, and Qwen3‑4B‑Instruct‑2507 confirm these findings and show that KL regularization also stabilizes off‑policy RL training in asynchronous setups.

By Vedant Shah, Johan Obando-Ceron, Vineet Jain, Brian Bartoldson, Bhavya Kailkhura, Sarthak Mittal, Glen Berseth, Pablo Samuel Castro, Yoshua Bengio, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Moksh Jain, Siddarth Venkatraman, Aaron Courville
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