On KL-Regularized Policy Optimization
arXiv:2610.08963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model (LLM) agents trains one policy on trajectories generated by another: rollouts come fr...
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:2610.08963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model (LLM) agents trains one policy on trajectories generated by another: rollouts come fr...
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.
arXiv:2602. 18037v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) or Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) are two key steps in the post-training of modern Language Models (LMs).
arXiv:2511. 23310v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective paradigm for post-training large language models, yet the design of its baselines and learning-rate schedules remains largely heuristic.
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).
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.
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:2609.26355v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning has become a central component of large language model (LLM) post-training, yet token-level credit lacks a generally accepted ma...
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.
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.
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.
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.