arXiv:2608.23830v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: RL has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the instruction following capabilities of LLMs. While existing training recipes achieve substanti...
By Mian Zhang, Yueqin Yin, Kaiyu He, Peilin Wu, Xinlu Zhang, Mingyuan Zhou, Zhiyu Zoey Chen
SIPO (Self‑Instructing Policy Optimization) unifies reinforcement learning with on‑policy self‑distillation by using a contrastive self‑teacher to generate token‑level credit signals. The method samples multiple rollouts per prompt, pairs each with a reference answer and its mistakes, and uses the difference in teacher log‑probabilities to provide dense feedback while still respecting the overall task reward. Experiments on reasoning and code‑generation benchmarks show that SIPO outperforms both RLVR and OPSD baselines without requiring an external teacher or extra generation steps.
By Zhenrui Yue, Huimin Zeng, Yueqi Wang, Yaokun Liu, Fengran Mo, Jinghan Zhang, Mung Yao Jia, Gyuseok Lee, Yang Zhang, Na Wei, Dong Wang
MInTRL (Minimal Intervention Reinforcement Learning) expands exploration in on-policy reinforcement learning by inserting sparse, local corrections into rollouts via a judge-intervention policy. These interventions replace erroneous suffixes and immediately return control to the main policy, allowing the agent to explore beyond its natural trajectory while maintaining on-policy data. The method uses a sequence-level advantage-regression objective, avoiding importance sampling, and demonstrates superior performance on math and code benchmarks compared to standard on-policy and off-policy baselines.
By Mingyu Chen, Yefan Tao, Gerald Friedland, Xuezhou Zhang, Chris Kong
The paper introduces an exploration-guided prompt scaffolding framework for multimodal large language models, dynamically adjusting the prompt distribution during reinforcement learning post-training. It uses an Exploration Potential Score (EPS) derived from KL-regularized policy improvement to assess prompt utility without extra overhead, and a teacher model rewrites low-utility prompts to preserve intent while improving informativeness. Experiments on Geo3K, MMK12, MathVision, and MMMU-Pro show consistent performance gains, up to 9.7% in-domain and over 11% on out-of-distribution benchmarks.
By Yuanhao Yue, Qianli Ma, Chengyu Wang, Haoting Wang, Lei Shen, Jun Huang
arXiv:2604. 10688v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy reinforcement learning has become the dominant paradigm for reasoning alignment in large language models, yet its sparse, outcome-level rewards make token-level credit assignment notoriously difficult.
By Binbin Zheng, Xing Ma, Yiheng Liang, Jingqing Ruan, Xiaoliang Fu, Kepeng Lin, Benchang Zhu, Ke Zeng, Xunliang Cai
arXiv:2607. 27610v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet its effectiveness critically depends on selecting prompts of appropriate difficulty for the current policy.
By Haodong Zhu, Yangyang Ren, Yanjing Li, Sheng Xu, Haiguang Liu, Linlin Yang, Baochang Zhang
arXiv:2607. 18082v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Rubric-based RL has recently shown promise in improving LLMs on open-ended tasks.
By Mingxuan Xia, Yuhang Yang, Chao Ye, Shuai Zhu, Shenzhi Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Yuhang Zhang, Cheng Peng, Haobo Wang, Siqing Wang
arXiv:2608. 03223v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning enables LLM agents to learn through interaction, but sparse trajectory-level rewards reveal success without identifying which intermediate decisions deserve credit.
By Ranxu Zhang, Guinan Chen, Chenshaodong, Jinghao Lin, Xiaozhou Xu, Sunzhe, Yanyong Zhang, Chao Wang
LLM-as-judge is essential for evaluating open-ended text and steering post-training, yet improving the judge itself typically relies on expensive annotations, reward models, or distillation from stron...
arXiv:2607. 18082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rubric-based RL has recently shown promise in improving LLMs on open-ended tasks.
By Mingxuan Xia, Yuhang Yang, Chao Ye, Shuai Zhu, Shenzhi Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Yuhang Zhang, Cheng Peng, Haobo Wang, Siqing Wang
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).
By Yixiu Mao, Yun Qu, Qi Wang, Heming Zou, Xiangyang Ji
arXiv:2606. 09887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models usually supervises reasoning with scalar outcome rewards, such as binary correctness.
By Zirui Liu, Jie Ouyang, Qi Liu, Xianquan Wang, Jiayu Liu, Tingyue Pan, Qingchuan Li, Jing Sha, Zhenya Huang, Shijin Wang, Enhong Chen