arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Make Sparse Rewards Count: Density-Aware Reward Aggregation for Multi-Reward RL

The paper introduces Density-Aware Reward Aggregation (DARA), a method that adjusts reward weighting in multi-reward reinforcement learning based on the density of active rewards within rollout batches. By applying an inverse-square-root density correction, DARA gives more weight to less frequently active rewards, enabling faster learning of targeted behaviors. Experiments on tool calling and mathematical reasoning demonstrate that DARA achieves comparable final performance while reducing training steps by up to 26% and 65% respectively.

By Tong Zheng, Skylar Zhai, Zhan Cheng, TianMing Sha, Youling Huang, Shuo Zhou, Shaotong Qi, Jingcheng Liang, Xuwei Ding, Pengcheng Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Why GRPO Needs Normalization: A Local-Curvature Perspective on Adaptive Gradients

The paper investigates why Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) benefits from per‑prompt normalization by examining the local curvature of the sequence‑level policy gradient. It shows that standard deviation normalization acts as an adaptive gradient, yielding a provably faster convergence rate than unnormalized REINFORCE under mild conditions, with the improvement tied to the average within‑prompt reward standard deviation. The authors also propose IS‑GRPO, an importance‑sampling variant that maintains alignment with the full gradient and offers a tighter convergence guarantee, and empirically validate these theoretical insights on GSM8K and MATH datasets at 1.5B and 7B model scales.

By Cheng Ge, Caitlyn Heqi Yin, Hao Liang, Jiawei Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Range-GRPO: Policy Optimization via Pairwise Relations among Reward Intervals

Range-GRPO introduces a semi‑supervised post‑training framework that uses conformally calibrated reward ranges instead of single point scores for large language models. By comparing reward ranges pairwise within rollout groups, the method incorporates reward uncertainty into both the magnitude and direction of learning signals. Experiments show that Range‑GRPO outperforms other semi‑supervised approaches on both in‑distribution and out‑of‑distribution tasks while using fewer training resources.

By Ryunyi Lee, Kangjun Noh, Somin Kim, Heedong Kim, Kyungwoo Song