arXiv AI By Md Rezwanul Haque, Md. Milon Islam, Fakhri Karray

Towards Robust Reinforcement Learning for Small-Scale Language Model Agents

Read the original on arXiv AI →

arXiv:2607. 25091v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The alignment of Small Language Models (SLMs) in the 70--500M parameter range using reinforcement learning is often considered unstable, though the underlying failure mechanisms have not been systematically investigated.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

EasyPPO: Stabilizing the Critic Is Key

arXiv:2609.36802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A key strength of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is its learned critic, which uses historical trajectories collected during reinforcement learning...

By Xuanyi Zhou, Qiuyang Mang, Huanzhi Mao, Dacheng Li, Wenhao Chai, Mayank Mishra, Yichuan Wang, Karthik Narasimhan, Alvin Cheung, Joseph E. Gonzalez
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Advantage Collapse in Group Relative Policy Optimization: Diagnosis and Mitigation

arXiv:2605. 21125v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a prominent algorithm within the Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) framework, has achieved strong results in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs).

By Xixiang He, Qiyao Sun, Ao Cheng, Xingming Li, Xuanyu Ji, Hailun Lu, Runke Huang, Qingyong Hu
arXiv AI
Jul 15

A Learning-Rate-Gated Failure of GRPO in a Small Language and Vision-Language Model Web Agent: A Controlled Null and Its Mechanism

arXiv:2607. 12640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in particular, is now run routinely on a supervised checkpoint in the hope of producing a stronger agent.

By Chengguang Gan, Zhixi Cai, Yunhao Liang, Hanjun Wei, Shiwen Ni, Qinghao Zhang