The paper critiques the common reinforcement‑learning approach of sampling tool subsets when the full set of tools is enumerable, showing that sampling leads to degraded policy estimates and increased reward sparsity in genomic reasoning tasks. It proposes Full‑Group Policy Optimization (FGPO), which evaluates every tool subset and precomputes rewards in a table, thereby eliminating the need for frozen‑reasoner calls during training. Experiments across five frozen reasoners and three genomic benchmarks demonstrate that FGPO consistently outperforms GRPO, improving average scores by 6.75 points and reducing the number of invoked tools per question.
Reinforcement learning over a frozen reasoner has become a common recipe for teaching a policy which external tools to invoke. We show that this recipe becomes structurally mismatched in specialist sc...
arXiv:2610.09804v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning is now central to eliciting reasoning in large language models, while in the popular algorithm Group Relative Policy Optimizatio...
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.
ReAPO: Retry-Aware Policy Optimization for Efficient Exploration in LLM Reasoning proposes a new approach to improve language‑model reasoning by addressing the inefficiencies of independent stochastic rollouts. By framing credit assignment as a Stochastic Shortest Path problem, ReAPO modifies GRPO to allocate more generation to failed trajectories, reinforcing successful retries without rewarding failures. Experiments on Qwen3 and OLMo‑2 models across eight mathematical and scientific benchmarks show that ReAPO outperforms GRPO and other baselines, achieving higher first‑attempt accuracy and reducing generated tokens needed to reach peak performance.
The paper investigates Evolution Strategies (ES) as a memory‑efficient post‑training method for large language model (LLM) reasoning. It demonstrates that ES outperforms Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) by achieving broader reasoning coverage, improving Pass@K metrics, and avoiding entropy collapse. The study also reveals that ES’s performance gains stem from sparse, high‑magnitude parameter updates, do not cause catastrophic forgetting, and can be combined with GRPO in a sequential training strategy.
arXiv:2607. 26253v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is bottlenecked by rollout generation, yet many sampled prompts produce saturated groups (all responses correct or all incorrect) whose zero reward variance yields no policy-gradient signal.
The paper introduces Single‑Rollout Pass@k Policy Optimization (SR‑PPO), a reinforcement learning method that uses only one rollout per prompt to train language‑model agents. SR‑PPO combines Monte Carlo token‑level advantage estimation with Pass@k gradient reweighting and an online critic for baseline and weight estimation. Experiments show that SR‑PPO achieves stable learning and performance comparable to traditional Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on reasoning and logic benchmarks, even when off‑policy drift degrades standard Pass@1 PPO.
arXiv:2609.37119v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent approaches to reinforcement learning (RL) post-training for large language models increasingly remove the critic to reduce training instabilit...
The paper introduces CLOSEDLOOPGAUSSIAN, an adaptive curriculum strategy for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) that dynamically adjusts the pace and spread of an Easy-to-Hard Gaussian sampler based on probe estimates of per-difficulty accuracy. Unlike fixed easy-to-hard schedules, the method accelerates training when the model outpaces a reference curriculum, slows it down when it lags, and broadens sampling when earlier difficulties regress, thereby keeping training focused on learnable yet challenging tasks. Experiments on symbolic arithmetic reasoning demonstrate that CLOSEDLOOPGAUSSIAN outperforms vanilla GRPO and fixed open-loop curricula, especially in intermediate-difficulty regimes where group-relative learning signals are most informative.
arXiv:2607. 00152v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Three of the most popular methods for training language models to reason look like three different tricks.
arXiv:2610.34949v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning models trained with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) now produce chains of thought thousands of tokens long, and recent studies re...
arXiv:2608. 20256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning language models trained with reinforcement learning typically operate under a fixed token budget rather than an explicitly adaptive one, which can lead to over-computation on easy problems and insufficient computation on difficult ones.