arXiv:2607.08837v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Exploration is essential to RL since a policy cannot improve by repeatedly sampling the behaviors it already prefers. Standard methods inject...
By Sunshine Jiang, John Marangola, David Zhang, Raghuram Kowdeed, Ruiyang Luo, Nitish Dashora, Richard Li, Pulkit Agrawal, Zhang-Wei Hong
arXiv:2607. 08837v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Exploration is essential to RL since a policy cannot improve by repeatedly sampling the behaviors it already prefers.
By Sunshine Jiang, John Marangola, David Zhang, Raghuram Kowdeed, Ruiyang Luo, Nitish Dashora, Richard Li, Pulkit Agrawal, Zhang-Wei Hong
The paper "Demystifying Reinforcement Learning Post-Training of Language Models" investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) post‑training enhances large language models (LLMs) for tasks such as reasoning, math, and coding. By isolating RL components in a controlled setting, the authors analyze how the base model’s prior distribution, reward granularity, prompt diversity, and model scale influence outcomes, using policy entropy to compare pre‑training, supervised fine‑tuning (SFT), and RL stages. The study clarifies the role of spurious rewards, the importance of the base model’s probability mass on desired behaviors, and how these factors interact to determine post‑training success, offering a practical primer for NLP researchers.
"whyItMatters":"The work provides a clearer understanding of RL post‑training mechanics, helping researchers and practitioners effectively apply RL to improve LLM capabilities."
By Donovan Clay, Saket Gollapudi, Sankar Harilal, Min Jang, Jacob Morrison, Sewoong Oh, Natasha Jaques
arXiv:2607. 21419v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In long-horizon LLM agent reinforcement learning, weak policies often repeat similar failures, producing uninformative rollout trajectories and limiting effective policy optimization.
By Yipeng Shi, Zhipeng Ma, Yue Wang, Qitai Tan, Yang Li, Peng Chen, Zhengzhou Zhu
arXiv:2608.24696v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) and on-policy distillation (OPD) have become two widely adopted paradigms for post-training lar...
By Wenze Lin, Jiale Zhao, Xitai Jiang, Songde Rao, Yining Li, Shenzhi Wang, Bingxiang He, Gao Huang
arXiv:2608.23830v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: RL has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the instruction following capabilities of LLMs. While existing training recipes achieve substanti...
By Mian Zhang, Yueqin Yin, Kaiyu He, Peilin Wu, Xinlu Zhang, Mingyuan Zhou, Zhiyu Zoey Chen