arXiv AI
5d ago

How to Train a Critic Stably and Efficiently

The paper introduces Best‑Practice Critic Optimization (BPCO), a stable and efficient recipe for training a critic in reinforcement learning for large language models. BPCO combines DPPO, bounded value predictions, Monte Carlo targets, unnormalized policy advantages, and length‑adaptive advantage estimation, allowing the critic to be conditioned on hidden reward information. Experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks with models from 1.5B to 30B parameters show that BPCO consistently outperforms a strong critic‑based baseline and matches or exceeds group‑based methods while sampling only one response per prompt.

By Penghui Qi, Xiangxin Zhou, Wee Sun Lee
arXiv AI
Jun 30

BV-Blend: Uncertainty-Weighted Historical Baselines for Stable Critic-Free RL with Verifiable Rewards

arXiv:2606. 28707v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Critic-free reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), exemplified by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), avoids training a value function (critic) and reduces memory and compute overhead relative to critic-based PPO pipelines for aligning large language models.

By Yupeng Chang, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang