The paper introduces Drift-Constrained Optimization (DCO), a framework that treats behavioral drift during fine‑tuning of instruction models as a bounded constraint rather than an uncontrolled side effect. By defining a drift budget, the authors reformulate fine‑tuning as a direction‑selection problem, showing that choosing different update directions can qualitatively change outcomes. Experiments on Qwen3 models demonstrate that carefully selected directions improve scientific reasoning and multilingual translation while preserving reasoning capabilities and general performance.
arXiv:2608. 05541v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evolution Strategy (ES) is a promising alternative to gradient-based fine-tuning for resource-constrained Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning.
arXiv:2606. 18284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The limiting resource for training agents via reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly frontier task supply: valid, solvable tasks just difficult enough to train the current model.
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...
arXiv:2510. 11686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to expand the capabilities of language models, but it is unclear if current RL techniques promote the discovery of novel behaviors, or simply sharpen those already present in the base model.
arXiv:2609.39702v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adapting a language model to a specialized corpus means choosing which instruction-tuning tasks to train on under a fixed budget, and testing one choic...
arXiv:2607. 11505v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post-training for large language models typically couples policy exploration with model optimization, hindering the reuse of high-reward behaviors from policy exploration.
Policy optimization (PO) for Large Language Models faces a stability--exploration trade-off, currently mediated by an action-side Policy-KL regularizer. This puts practitioners in a double bind: keepi...
arXiv:2607. 00531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific reasoning is an increasingly important capability of large language models, yet improving the robustness and efficiency of training such reasoning remains a key open challenge.
arXiv:2607. 18006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models achieve strong reasoning performance, but often at prohibitive training cost - a challenge that is especially acute for compact models ($\leq 4 \, \mathrm{B}$ parameters) trained under limited budgets.
Draft-OPD introduces an on‑policy distillation method for speculative draft models, addressing the mismatch between supervised fine‑tuning and inference by letting the target model supervise the drafter on draft‑induced states. The approach uses target‑assisted rollouts for stable continuations and replays drafting from error positions exposed during verification, enabling the drafter to learn from both accepted and rejected proposals. Experiments demonstrate that Draft‑OPD achieves more than five‑fold lossless acceleration across diverse tasks, outperforming prior draft models such as EAGLE‑3 and DFlash by 23 % and 13 % respectively.
arXiv:2610.02015v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in LLM reasoning models---driven primarily by the paradigm of post-training via reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR)-...
Large language models achieve strong reasoning performance, but often at prohibitive training cost - a challenge that is especially acute for compact models ($\leq 4 \, \mathrm{B}$ parameters) trained under limited budgets. We introduce MADA-RL, a post-training framework that specializes compact models into generator and critic roles and trains them with a debate-aware learning signal, fine-tuning only a small subset of parameters via LoRA adapters.