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
arXiv:2609.26355v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement learning has become a central component of large language model (LLM) post-training, yet token-level credit lacks a generally accepted ma...
By Jiayan Fu, Hang Xu, Yong Zhang, Zhaokai Luo, Yao Hu, Dongyan Zhao, Mu Chuan
arXiv:2609.21432v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Post-training plays a pivotal role in enhancing the reasoning capabilities and task-specific expertise of large language models (LLMs). Despite recent...
By Kaichen Zhang, Yuzhong Hong, Junwei Bao, Hongfei Jiang, Yang Song, Dingqian Hong, Hui Xiong
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:2608.23566v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Group-based reinforcement learning methods such as GRPO for large language models avoid training a critic by sampling multiple responses for...
By Penghui Qi, Xiangxin Zhou, Wee Sun Lee
The paper introduces Personalized Group Relative Policy Optimization (P‑GRPO), a new alignment framework for large language models that separates advantage estimation from immediate batch statistics. By normalizing advantages using preference‑group‑specific reward histories instead of the concurrent generation group, P‑GRPO maintains contrastive signals for distinct user preferences. Experiments across various tasks show that P‑GRPO converges faster and yields higher rewards than standard GRPO, improving alignment with heterogeneous human preferences while preserving general capabilities.
By Jialu Wang, Heinrich Peters, Asad A. Butt, Navid Hashemi, Alireza Hashemi, Pouya M. Ghari, Joseph Hoover, James Rae, Morteza Dehghani