arXiv:2605.06375v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Policy-gradient methods need a scalar reward, yet for many tasks no formula captures what we want, while judging which of two outcomes is bet...
By Hao Yu
The paper investigates the problem of sharing a single critic across multiple parallel environments in reinforcement learning. It shows that when environments assign different expected returns to the same state, a shared critic must reconcile conflicting value targets, which can distort advantage estimates and misguide policy updates. The authors propose a simple fix—providing the critic with the environment index—demonstrating through bandit models and experiments on CartPole, MuJoCo, BipedalWalker, and 16 Procgen games that this conditional critic stabilizes learning and boosts returns, achieving a 40.8% improvement in aggregate normalized return on unseen levels.
By Zhenya Liu, Yang Meng, Zhuokai Zhao, Xuefeng Liu, Yuxin Chen
arXiv:2610.19103v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Group-based reinforcement learning enables large language model agents to learn from sparse outcome rewards in long-horizon tasks. Recent methods deriv...
By Huiwen Han, Ziyao Zeng, Zihao Zhu, Sisong Bei, Hao Wang, Hongyu Xu, Yan Han, Degui Zhi, Zhiwen Fan
arXiv:2606. 25451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating token-level advantages in reinforcement learning (RL) for language models remains challenging because scaling up episodic experience collection is expensive.
By Fengdi Che, Yang Liu, Lei Yu, Meng Cao, Tong Che, Rupam Mahmood, Dale Schuurmans
arXiv:2609.32791v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Reinforcement mid-training lets language models learn internal thoughts from unlabeled text, but efficient token-level credit assignment remains ch...
By Nan Qiao, Yebin Yang, Weinong Wang, Shuning Wang, Shangpin Peng, Fengyuan Lu, Xinming Wang, Zhehan Kan, Ruixu Zhang, Songyang Zhang, Sheng Yue, Yonglong Tian, Ju Ren
arXiv:2606. 25556v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stepwise group-based RL is an attractive way to train long-horizon LLM agents without a learned critic: it reuses multiple sampled rollouts to estimate local advantages.
By Hanyang Wang, Weijieying Ren, Yuxiang Zhang, Ding Cao, Zhizhao Zeng, Ke Zeng, Tianxiang Zhao