arXiv AI
Oct 12

MENTOR: Learning from Failure with On-Policy Pedagogical Intervention

The paper introduces MENTOR, a multi‑agent framework that provides on‑policy pedagogical intervention to address zero‑reward collapse in reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards. MENTOR diagnoses failures in real time and generates targeted prompts to guide the learning agent, integrating seamlessly with existing policy optimization pipelines such as GRPO. Experiments on math and code generation tasks show that MENTOR significantly reduces collapse, achieving up to 78.3% relative gains on Llama‑3.2‑3B‑Instruct.

By Guanlan Yue, Hang Yu, Xiaoyong Huang, Ruipeng Li, Wei Zhang, Bingchang Liu, Rui Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

MInTRL: Off-policy Intervention can boost On-policy RL

MInTRL (Minimal Intervention Reinforcement Learning) expands exploration in on-policy reinforcement learning by inserting sparse, local corrections into rollouts via a judge-intervention policy. These interventions replace erroneous suffixes and immediately return control to the main policy, allowing the agent to explore beyond its natural trajectory while maintaining on-policy data. The method uses a sequence-level advantage-regression objective, avoiding importance sampling, and demonstrates superior performance on math and code benchmarks compared to standard on-policy and off-policy baselines.

By Mingyu Chen, Yefan Tao, Gerald Friedland, Xuezhou Zhang, Chris Kong