arXiv Machine Learning

MOER: Mix-Policy Optimization under Expert Prefix Guidance with Selective Rollback

MOER is a mix‑policy optimization framework that blends expert guidance with self‑exploration in reinforcement learning. It injects a decaying expert chain‑of‑thought prefix into prompts, progressively annealing the prefix length to encourage exploration, and uses a selective rollback mechanism to replace failed completions with the full expert trace, ensuring correctness. The method employs a harmonized mix‑policy objective that optimizes on‑policy tokens with a GRPO loss while supervising both expert prefix and completion tokens with a trust‑region SFT loss, leading to stable training and superior performance on mathematical and general reasoning tasks.

arXiv AI
Sep 4

FlowBalance: Verifier-Grounded Self-Improvement from On-Policy Reasoning Experience

arXiv:2609. 03241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A reasoning model can improve from its own on-policy experience, but this inner loop is fragile: terminal verifiers provide reliable yet sparse supervision, while dense same-model guidance can reinforce false confidence or overconcentrate learning on a narrow solution mode.

By Zixun Huang, Kishan Panaganti, Haitao Mi, Leowei Liang
arXiv AI
Oct 7

Rationale-Guided Policy Optimization: Learning to Reason with Adaptive Rationale Scaffolding

Rationale-Guided Policy Optimization (RGPO) is a reinforcement‑learning framework that adaptively uses ground‑truth rationale information to scaffold a language model’s reasoning process. Instead of treating reference solutions as fixed imitation targets, RGPO temporarily incorporates rationales to help the model generate better responses, then reverts to unguided learning with higher‑reward, model‑generated solutions. Experiments in both language‑only and vision‑language tasks show that RGPO consistently outperforms RLVR baselines, with ablation studies confirming that adaptive rationale guidance is a key factor in its success.

By Hoang Phan, Minh Pham, Chau Pham, Chinmay Hegde, Trung Le, Qi Lei
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

EPIC: Rethinking Trust Regions for Autoregressive LLM Policies via Exact-KL Prefix Importance-Ratio Clipping

EPIC introduces a new PPO-style clipping method that operates at the prefix level rather than token level, using the exact reverse-KL coordinate to regulate policy drift during autoregressive generation. By reformulating generation as a finite-horizon Markov decision process, the authors derive a performance-difference identity that identifies the cumulative likelihood ratio of the generated prefix as the exact importance weight for each policy-improvement step. Experiments on off‑policy reinforcement learning with a sparse mixture‑of‑experts language model demonstrate that EPIC consistently outperforms standard and sequence‑level clipping baselines on mathematical‑reasoning benchmarks while remaining competitive with routing‑replay alternatives.

By Chengxi Li, Hanlin Wu, Zhicheng Cai, Huan-ang Gao, Wei-Ying Ma, Jingjing Liu, Hao Zhou
arXiv AI
Oct 7

Stabilizing Off-Policy Training for Long-Horizon LLM Agent via Turn-Level Importance Sampling and Clipping-Triggered Normalization

The paper introduces SORL, a framework that stabilizes off‑policy reinforcement learning for long‑horizon large language model agents. It identifies two key instability sources—token‑level policy granularity mismatches and high‑variance off‑policy updates—and proposes turn‑level importance sampling and clipping‑triggered normalization to align optimization with multi‑turn interactions. Two instantiations, SO‑PPO and SO‑GRPO, are evaluated on open‑domain, multi‑hop, and medical QA benchmarks, as well as on asynchronous RL for mathematical reasoning, showing improved robustness without the need for early stopping or heuristic tuning.

By Chenliang Li, Adel Elmahdy, Alex Boyd, Zhongruo Wang, Siliang Zeng, Alfredo Garcia, Parminder Bhatia, Taha Kass-Hout, Cao Xiao, Mingyi Hong
arXiv AI
Jul 2

Selective Expert Guidance for Effective and Diverse Exploration in Reinforcement Learning of LLMs

arXiv:2510. 04140v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a widely adopted technique for enhancing the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs).

By Zishang Jiang, Jinyi Han, Tingyun Li, Xinyi Wang, Sihang Jiang, Jiaqing Liang, Zhaoqian Dai, Shuguang Ma, Fei Yu, Yanghua Xiao
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 12

Cross-Behavior Policy Optimization: Unified Learning from Offline Demonstrations and On- and Off-Policy Rollouts via a Shared Regression Target

The paper introduces Cross-Behavior Policy Optimization (CBPO), a method that unifies offline demonstrations and policy-generated rollouts into a single regression loss using a fixed-reference target. CBPO eliminates the need for separate supervised fine‑tuning and reinforcement learning objectives, allowing positive and negative offline completions, reference responses, and current and historical rollouts to share a common reward‑labeled format and replay buffer. Experiments on two model scales and four mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that CBPO, especially the CBPO‑Unified variant, outperforms baseline methods in avg@32 and pass@32 metrics, with historical rollouts providing additional gains.

By Du Cheng, Junyu Lu, Jingfan Zhang, Yuzhuo Zhang, Haoxuan Jia, Shichao Weng
arXiv AI
Sep 25

CounterRoute: Self-Routed Reasoning via Hierarchical Counterfactual Credit Assignment

CounterRoute is an online reinforcement‑learning framework that jointly learns how to route a language model’s reasoning between a ‘think’ and a ‘direct answer’ mode, using a single shared policy derived from a dual‑mode checkpoint. It employs counterfactual rollouts to credit routing decisions and a curriculum that starts with forced dual‑mode rollouts before shifting to self‑routed updates, achieving better accuracy‑efficiency trade‑offs across nine benchmarks. The method reduces generated tokens by up to 51% on Qwen3‑8B while improving macro‑average accuracy, and its routing strategy generalizes to unseen coding, science, and commonsense tasks.

By Ruochen Jiao, Besnik Fetahu, Zhenyu Shi, Priyanka Nigam
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Not All Prompts Are Equal: Exploration-Guided Prompt Scaffolding for Multimodal Reinforcement Post-Training

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