Evolution Strategies at Scale: LLM Fine-Tuning Beyond Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2509. 24372v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks is an essential stage of modern AI deployment.
arXiv:2608. 12679v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in discovery domains such as math and science.
arXiv:2509. 24372v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks is an essential stage of modern AI deployment.
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:2606. 29082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Would experience designing faster GPU kernels also help close in on a long-standing open mathematical conjecture?
arXiv:2604. 01499v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evolution Strategies (ES) have emerged as a scalable gradient-free alternative to reinforcement learning based LLM fine-tuning, but it remains unclear whether comparable task performance implies comparable solutions in parameter space.
arXiv:2604. 17244v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents for sequential decision-making struggle to produce diverse outputs.
arXiv:2607. 16206v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces PPO-HSC (Proximal Policy Optimization with High-order Sampling Coverage), an exploratory reinforcement learning framework designed to address the "Invisible Shackles" of mode collapse in Large Language Model (LLM) fine-tuning.
arXiv:2608. 05651v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-driven evolution has shown promise for program search and algorithm discovery, but relying on strong models throughout long evolutionary runs is costly.
arXiv:2608. 02391v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using large language model (LLM) agents produce long, multi-turn trajectories, making gradient-based post-training memory-intensive.
The paper introduces a method to enhance large language model (LLM) exploration in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) by guiding the target model with partial reasoning trajectories from smaller, weaker language models. This weak-model guidance disrupts over‑confidence, preserves generative diversity, and mitigates entropy collapse without extra fine‑tuning or complex reward designs. Experiments on mathematical benchmarks show consistent improvements over vanilla RLVR, especially as the number of allowed attempts ($k$) increases, indicating broader reasoning coverage.
Large language model (LLM)-driven evolution has shown promise for program search and algorithm discovery, but relying on strong models throughout long evolutionary runs is costly. A natural alternative is to combine cheap and strong models under a fixed inference budget.
arXiv:2605. 30789v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We identify a new dimension for enhancing rollout diversity in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for LLMs.
The paper proposes a new approach to large language model (LLM) reasoning that moves beyond naive repeated sampling. Instead of generating many independent solutions, it first samples problem‑specific concepts, hints, or strategies and conditions answer generation on them, producing a single trajectory of diverse concepts. A small concept generator is then trained via reinforcement learning to maximize downstream success, leading to significant improvements in pass@k on hard mathematical reasoning tasks compared to both naive sampling and concepts from larger untuned models, and the trained generator transfers to unseen answer generators, including those from different model families.