arXiv Machine Learning

MIPS: Mitigating Mode Collapse in Reinforcement Learning for Large Outcome Spaces

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 1

Discrete Compositional Generation via General Soft Operators and Robust Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2506.17007v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A major bottleneck in scientific discovery consists of narrowing an exponentially large set of objects, such as proteins or molecules, to a small s...

By Marco Jiralerspong, Esther Derman, Danilo Vucetic, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Bilun Sun, Tianyu Zhang, Pierre-Luc Bacon, Gauthier Gidel
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 5

Understanding Enrichment in Reinforcement Learning

The paper investigates how enrichment—adding intermediate guidance to sparse rewards in reinforcement learning—affects policy-gradient updates. It shows that omitting or truncating importance-weight corrections implicitly reweights rewards, and decomposes the resulting gradient error into scale, rotation, and variance components. The authors propose a sequential Monte Carlo weight correction that mitigates variance growth, and apply their analysis to a fine-tuned Qwen3-1.7B model on OpenMathReasoning, illustrating how enrichment helps prevent collapse in sparse domains.

By Jinwoo Kim, Shraddha Barke
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

ExTra: Exploratory Trajectory Optimization for Language Model Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 24994v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for language-model reasoning can fail at both extremes of task difficulty: easy prompts often produce all-correct, low-diversity rollout groups with little gradient signal, while hard prompts can produce all-incorrect groups with no positive reward.

By Wenyang Hu, Junxiang Jia, Zhen Shu, Daniel Dahlmeier, See-Kiong Ng, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 8

Leveraging Error Diversity in Group Rollouts for Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605. 17333v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) typically samples multiple responses per prompt and assigns binary rewards based on individual correctness, yet the collective structure of the group output, specifically the distribution of errors, is largely discarded.

By Wenpu Liu, Yuqi Xu, Weichu Xie, Yongfu Zhu, Shuai Dong, Ziyue Wang, Wenqi Shao, Xiaoying Zhang, Tong Yang, Nan Duan, Jiaqi Wang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 20

SAPO: Single-Rollout Autoregressive Policy Optimization for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) has become a critical stage in the post-training of large language models. Existing critic-free, group-relative methods estimate policy advantages from multiple rollouts, avoiding the substantial memory overhead of conventional proximal policy optimization (PPO) and achieving strong performance on long-horizon interactive tasks.

arXiv AI
Jun 4

Curated Synthetic Data Doesn't Have to Collapse: A Theoretical Study of Generative Retraining with Pluralistic Preferences

arXiv:2605. 07724v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recursive retraining of generative models poses a critical representation challenge: when synthetic outputs are curated based on a fixed reward signal, the model tends to collapse onto a narrow set of outputs that over-optimize that objective.

By Ali Falahati, Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri, Kate Larson, Lukasz Golab