The paper introduces the concept of Stable but Wrong (SBW), describing situations where a learning process appears stable yet converges to a solution that is systematically biased away from a true objective. Using a minimal strongly convex model, the authors demonstrate that persistent bias in update directions can shift the convergence point from the optimal solution. Experiments across reinforcement learning, supervised learning, and continual fine-tuning of large language models reveal a recurring disconnect between normal optimization behavior and correctness under both static and feedback‑coupled biases, and show that recovery interventions can still modify subsequent learning trajectories.
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:2603. 00963v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While reinforcement learning (RL) has been central to the recent success of large language models (LLMs), RL optimization is notoriously unstable, especially when compared to supervised fine-tuning (SFT).
arXiv:2606. 08779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a pivotal post-training paradigm, yet it frequently suffers from unpredictable sub-optimum performance or even training collapses.
arXiv:2605. 25582v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning for large language models faces a fundamental trade-off between sample efficiency and asymptotic performance: strictly on-policy methods discard trajectories after a single update, while off-policy reuse introduces distribution mismatch that existing trust-region techniques mitigate primarily by enforcing conservative optimization, often leaving rich training signals underutilized.
arXiv:2607. 10481v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet the training process remains notoriously fragile.
arXiv:2605. 20256v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning has become a cornerstone for aligning and unlocking the reasoning capabilities of large-scale models.
arXiv:2602. 21492v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training paradigm for large language models (LLMs), but its performance is highly sensitive to the quality of training problems.
arXiv:2609.27667v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) achieves strong performance in sequential decision-making but remains brittle under dynamic uncertainty and distributional...
arXiv:2606. 10228v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safe exploration is a prerequisite for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents in safety-critical domains.
The paper introduces Bidirectional Behavior Prior Distillation (B2PD), a method that uses action‑value priors to train a conditional variational autoencoder for generating high‑value behavior support. These expert behavior priors are then distilled into the online reinforcement learning agent, reducing inefficient exploration and stabilizing policy updates. Experiments on state‑ and pixel‑based tasks show that B2PD improves sample efficiency while maintaining stable learning dynamics.
arXiv:2607. 24062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) training for Large Language Models (LLMs) often suffers from instability due to the discrepancy between training and inference.
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.