The paper investigates Evolution Strategies (ES) as a memory‑efficient post‑training method for large language model (LLM) reasoning. It demonstrates that ES outperforms Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) by achieving broader reasoning coverage, improving Pass@K metrics, and avoiding entropy collapse. The study also reveals that ES’s performance gains stem from sparse, high‑magnitude parameter updates, do not cause catastrophic forgetting, and can be combined with GRPO in a sequential training strategy.
By Yunpeng Ba, Zhi Zheng, Yue Xie, Jiaqing Li, Xialiang Tong, Tao Zhong, Mingxuan Yuan, Zhichao Lu, Xuyang Wu, Zhenkun Wang
arXiv:2505. 20161v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Effective generalization in language models depends critically on the diversity of their training data.
By Jaehun Jung, Seungju Han, Ximing Lu, Skyler Hallinan, David Acuna, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Mostafa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Yejin Choi
arXiv:2609.39321v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a memory-efficient reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) technique for reasoning-intensive tasks....
By Rajat Ghosh, Vaishnavi Bhargava, Henry Wong, Aryan Singhal, Debojyoti Dutta
arXiv:2607. 06987v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the standard paradigm for enhancing the complex reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs).
By Chongyu Fan, Pengfei Liu, Jingjia Huang, Sijia Liu, Yi Lin
arXiv:2606. 15080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) show strong performance in English, they often fail to reason in the language of the query, a phenomenon known as language collapse.
By Dayeon Ki, Kevin Duh, Marine Carpuat
The paper introduces Drift-Constrained Optimization (DCO), a framework that treats behavioral drift during fine‑tuning of instruction models as a bounded constraint rather than an uncontrolled side effect. By defining a drift budget, the authors reformulate fine‑tuning as a direction‑selection problem, showing that choosing different update directions can qualitatively change outcomes. Experiments on Qwen3 models demonstrate that carefully selected directions improve scientific reasoning and multilingual translation while preserving reasoning capabilities and general performance.
By Fei Yuan, Changjiang Gao, Yilei Tu, Yifeng Liu, Shujian Huang, Yu Qiao