arXiv Computation and Language

S3AC: Stabilized, Selective, and Scalable Actor-Critic for LLM Reasoning

arXiv AI
Oct 2

Your Language Model is Its Own Critic: Reinforcement Learning with Value Estimation from Actor's Internal States

The paper introduces POISE, a reinforcement learning algorithm that uses a model’s internal states as a value estimator to reduce variance in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). By employing a lightweight probe that reads internal signals during the forward pass, POISE predicts baselines online and uses a cross‑rollout construction to keep gradients unbiased. Experiments on Qwen3‑4B and OLMo3‑7B‑Instruct‑DPO across six domains show POISE outperforms existing RLVR baselines, offering more stable training and a value model that generalizes across tasks and scales with the policy.

By Yunho Choi, Jongwon Lim, Woojin Ahn, Minjae Oh, Jeonghoon Shim, Yohan Jo
arXiv AI
Oct 15

Learning with a Single Rollout via Pass@k Policy Optimization

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.

By Fengdi Che, Yang Liu, Lei Yu, Meng Cao, Tong Che, Rupam Mahmood, Dale Schuurmans
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 22

ReAPO: Retry-Aware Policy Optimization for Efficient Exploration in LLM Reasoning

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.

By Nghi Dao, Calder Morton-Ferguson, Noah Golowich, Adam Block
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

The Easy, the Hard, and the Learnable: Confidence and Difficulty-Adaptive Policy Optimization for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 07950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: RL with verifiable rewards can substantially improve LLM reasoning, yet standard GRPO-style training often treats easy, hard, and learnable questions alike through uniform sampling and weighting, leading to inefficient compute allocation.

By Zhanke Zhou, Xiangyu Lu, Chentao Cao, Brando Miranda, Tongliang Liu, Bo Han, Sanmi Koyejo