ICT framework applies JS divergence to token logits to select critical tokens for selective RLVR updates, claiming 4.58% average pass@4 gains on Qwen2.5 models across seven reasoning benchmarks.
Revisiting Entropy Regularization: Adaptive Coefficient Unlocks Its Potential for LLM Reinforcement Learning
9 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
Reasoning ability has become a defining capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) emerging as a key paradigm to enhance it. However, RLVR training often suffers from policy entropy collapse, where the policy becomes overly deterministic, hindering exploration and limiting reasoning performance. While entropy regularization is a common remedy, its effectiveness is highly sensitive to the fixed coefficient, making it unstable across tasks and models. In this work, we revisit entropy regularization in RLVR and argue that its potential has been largely underestimated. Our analysis shows that (i) tasks of varying difficulty demand distinct exploration intensities, and (ii) balanced exploration may require the policy entropy to be maintained within a moderate range below its initial level. Therefore, we propose Adaptive Entropy Regularization (AER)--a framework that dynamically balances exploration and exploitation via three components: difficulty-aware coefficient allocation, initial-anchored target entropy, and dynamic global coefficient adjustment. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that AER consistently outperforms baselines, improving both reasoning accuracy and exploration capability.
years
2026 9representative citing papers
Visual CoT agents exhibit tool-use collapse where tool usage declines but task accuracy rises, and adding entropy regularization for rollout diversity produces the strongest performance.
CurveRL derives a quantile-coordinate reweighting rule from a utility functional on pass rates and shows it outperforms GRPO on reasoning benchmarks.
HORA adaptively allocates rollouts using hit utility to improve Pass@K over compute-matched GRPO on math reasoning benchmarks while preserving Pass@1.
NudgeRL conditions RLVR rollouts on strategy-level contexts to drive diverse trajectories and applies an inter/intra-context reward decomposition plus distillation objective, outperforming GRPO and oracle baselines on math benchmarks.
SAGE reshapes the reverse-KL anchor via guide function q(x,y) for controllable empirical support expansion, yielding gains in both pass@1 and pass@k on math reasoning benchmarks.
Reasoning in large output spaces proceeds via shortlisting then fine-grained reasoning; this characterization enables a mechanistic distillation strategy that outperforms standard distillation.
EKSFT masks high-entropy or high-KL tokens in low-data SFT to preserve pre-trained distribution and improve downstream RL performance on math reasoning tasks.
Novice programmers completed more tasks with lower workload using GitHub Copilot versus a human partner, but reported significantly more positive and arousing emotions with the human teammate.
citing papers explorer
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Beyond Entropy: Learning from Token-Level Distributional Deviations for LLM Reasoning
ICT framework applies JS divergence to token logits to select critical tokens for selective RLVR updates, claiming 4.58% average pass@4 gains on Qwen2.5 models across seven reasoning benchmarks.
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Diversity Over Frequency: Rethinking Tool Use in Visual Chain-of-Thought Agents
Visual CoT agents exhibit tool-use collapse where tool usage declines but task accuracy rises, and adding entropy regularization for rollout diversity produces the strongest performance.
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CurveRL: Principled Distribution-Aware Context Reweighting for LLM Reasoning
CurveRL derives a quantile-coordinate reweighting rule from a utility functional on pass rates and shows it outperforms GRPO on reasoning benchmarks.
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Where to Spend Rollouts: Hit-Utility Optimal Rollout Allocation for Group-Based RLVR
HORA adaptively allocates rollouts using hit utility to improve Pass@K over compute-matched GRPO on math reasoning benchmarks while preserving Pass@1.
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Nudging Beyond the Comfort Zone: Efficient Strategy-Guided Exploration for RLVR
NudgeRL conditions RLVR rollouts on strategy-level contexts to drive diverse trajectories and applies an inter/intra-context reward decomposition plus distillation objective, outperforming GRPO and oracle baselines on math benchmarks.
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SAGE: Shaping Anchors for Guided Exploration in RLVR of LLMs
SAGE reshapes the reverse-KL anchor via guide function q(x,y) for controllable empirical support expansion, yielding gains in both pass@1 and pass@k on math reasoning benchmarks.
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Characterize Then Distill: Mechanistic Reasoning in Large Output Spaces
Reasoning in large output spaces proceeds via shortlisting then fine-grained reasoning; this characterization enables a mechanistic distillation strategy that outperforms standard distillation.
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Entropy-KL Divergence-based Token Masking: A Novel Approach for Selective Fine-tuning of Large Language Models
EKSFT masks high-entropy or high-KL tokens in low-data SFT to preserve pre-trained distribution and improve downstream RL performance on math reasoning tasks.
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OGER: A Robust Offline-Guided Exploration Reward for Hybrid Reinforcement Learning
Novice programmers completed more tasks with lower workload using GitHub Copilot versus a human partner, but reported significantly more positive and arousing emotions with the human teammate.