arXiv Machine Learning

Gibbs-Gap Policy Optimization for Off-Policy RL with Verifiable Rewards

Gibbs‑Gap Policy Optimization (GGPO) is a new off‑policy reinforcement learning method that avoids high‑variance learner‑to‑behavior importance weights by minimizing a log‑mean‑exp contrast of KL‑adjusted rewards across responses to the same prompt. Derived from KL‑regularized policy optimization, GGPO guarantees that a learner’s single‑response expected reward is at least the behavior policy’s best‑of‑K reward minus bounded terms, and it includes a reference‑refresh mechanism that empirically improves performance. Experiments on benchmark problems and mathematical reasoning tasks show GGPO outperforming GRPO and AGRO, especially under training‑inference mismatch and with fixed offline data. whyItMatters":"The paper demonstrates a practical improvement in off‑policy RL for language models by reducing variance and ensuring better reward guarantees, which is directly supported by the reported empirical gains and theoretical bounds."

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

Post-Training at the Edge of Detectability: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Fine-Tuning

Reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning is widely used in language model training to improve model performance on a target task while limiting drift from a reference policy. A standard way to balance this trade-off is via a KL-regularized RL objective, although this formulation does not by itself provide a principled way to set the regularization coefficient.

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
Jul 30

Post-Training at the Edge of Detectability: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2607. 26358v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning is widely used in language model training to improve model performance on a target task while limiting drift from a reference policy.

By Keegan Harris, Brian W. Lee, Ian Waudby-Smith, Philip Amortila, Nika Haghtalab, Michael I. Jordan