ARCA assigns token credit in LoRA-based LLM RL from the norm of adapter-induced hidden state changes, yielding non-degenerate distributions and competitive performance on MATH tasks with Qwen3-1.7B under GRPO.
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REINFORCE++: Stabilizing Critic-Free Policy Optimization with Global Advantage Normalization
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abstract
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback~(RLHF) plays a crucial role in aligning Large Language Models~(LLMs). The dominant algorithm, Proximal Policy Optimization~(PPO), employs a critic network to estimate advantages, which introduces significant computational and memory overhead. To address this, a family of critic-free algorithms (e.g., GRPO, RLOO) has emerged. However, these methods typically rely on \textit{prompt-level (local)} advantage normalization, which suffers from inaccurate advantage estimation, a tendency to overfit, and, as we show, is a theoretically biased estimator. To solve these challenges, we introduce REINFORCE++, a critic-free framework centered on \textbf{Global Advantage Normalization}. By normalizing advantages across the entire global batch rather than small, prompt-specific groups, our method provides a more stable and theoretically sound, \textit{effectively unbiased} estimate (whose bias vanishes as batch size increases). We introduce two variants: REINFORCE++, a highly efficient and general algorithm ($k \ge 1$) for general-domain RLHF, and REINFORCE++ /w baseline, a robust group-sampling variant ($k > 1$) for complex reasoning tasks. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that each variant shows superior stability and performance in its respective domain, outperforming existing methods and even PPO in complex agentic settings.
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representative citing papers
RAISE is a standardized benchmark for RAG hyperparameter optimization that evaluates 13 search algorithms across seven datasets and finds performance is highly task-dependent.
Introduces a state-aligned latent actor-critic framework that lets diffusion models act as their own timestep-conditioned value functions for trajectory-level RL post-training and inference steering.
BASIS achieves superior value estimation and policy optimization in LLM reasoning with single rollouts by batchwise information sharing compared to existing single and multi-rollout methods.
Pion modifies Muon's Newton-Schulz iterations into a controllable high-pass filter that anchors dominant singular values at 1 while suppressing noisy tails, outperforming Muon and AdamW in VLA and RLVR regimes.
DISA decouples partition function estimation using offline importance sampling for distribution-matching LLM-RL, matching or exceeding online baselines like FlowRL on math and code benchmarks while retaining more strategy diversity.
Anchored Bipolicy Self-Play trains role-specific LoRA adapters on a frozen base model to break self-consistency collapse in self-play red-teaming, yielding up to 100x parameter efficiency and stronger safety on Qwen2.5 models.
AffectGPT-RL applies reinforcement learning to optimize non-differentiable emotion wheel metrics in open-vocabulary multimodal emotion recognition, yielding performance gains and state-of-the-art results on basic emotion recognition benchmarks.
A one-parameter early-termination gate based on mean pairwise prefix edit distance reduces wall-clock time by 10.7% and raises held-out success by 2.5 pp in GRPO on ALFWorld by cutting zero-advantage batch dilution.
EXPO-SQL improves Text-to-SQL by using clause-level rewards derived from execution error messages and incremental clause execution instead of uniform query-level rewards.
EVPO adaptively switches between critic-based and batch-mean advantage estimation using batch-level explained variance to provably achieve no greater variance than the better of PPO or GRPO at every step.
ReflectMT internalizes reflection via two-stage RL to enable direct high-quality machine translation that outperforms explicit reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 on WMT24 while using 94% fewer tokens.
Freshness-Aware PER augments prioritized experience replay with exponential age decay based on effective sample size to enable successful reuse of trajectories in LLM and VLM reinforcement learning, outperforming on-policy baselines on agentic tasks.
NExt accelerates RLVR training for LLMs by nonlinearly extrapolating low-rank parameter trajectories extracted from LoRA runs.
RAR retrieves candidate items from a 300k-movie corpus then uses LLM generation with RL feedback to produce context-aware recommendations that outperform baselines on benchmarks.
GPS trains a small model on optimization history to predict prompt difficulty and select intermediate-difficulty diverse batches, yielding better training efficiency, final performance, and test-time allocation than baselines on reasoning benchmarks.
Miner uses intrinsic policy uncertainty with token-level focal credit assignment and adaptive advantage calibration as a self-supervised reward to enable efficient RL training on positive homogeneous prompts, yielding up to 4.58 Pass@1 gains over GRPO on Qwen3 models.
A 400k+ GPU-hour study shows RL scaling in LLMs follows predictable sigmoidal trajectories, with most design choices affecting efficiency rather than the performance asymptote, enabling accurate large-scale predictions via the ScaleRL recipe.
TokenBuncher constrains response entropy via entropy-as-reward RL and a Token Noiser to stop harmful RL fine-tuning while keeping benign performance intact.
One training example via RLVR boosts LLM math reasoning from 17.6% to 35.7% average across six benchmarks.
SAVE enables self-supervised reward model improvement by anchoring on-policy response grading with a prompt-specific value head, computing advantages, filtering ambiguous samples, and updating via contrastive objective.
CRPO modifies GRPO with three mechanisms—decoupling task and style rewards, adapting constraints to character complexity, and using generic responses as negative baselines—to improve character fidelity in role-playing agents.
CLORE augments correct on-policy rollouts by deleting repetitive and irrelevant segments then optimizes with auxiliary DPO to improve accuracy-efficiency trade-off on math benchmarks.
CRPO applies counterfactual videos and a cross-branch relation reward in RL post-training to reduce shortcut reliance in Video LLMs, with gains shown on the new DyBench paired benchmark.
citing papers explorer
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ARCA: Adapter-Residual Credit Assignment When Token Signals Degenerate
ARCA assigns token credit in LoRA-based LLM RL from the norm of adapter-induced hidden state changes, yielding non-degenerate distributions and competitive performance on MATH tasks with Qwen3-1.7B under GRPO.
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RAISE: RAG Design as an Architecture Search Problem
RAISE is a standardized benchmark for RAG hyperparameter optimization that evaluates 13 search algorithms across seven datasets and finds performance is highly task-dependent.
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Explicit Critic Guidance for Aligning Diffusion Models
Introduces a state-aligned latent actor-critic framework that lets diffusion models act as their own timestep-conditioned value functions for trajectory-level RL post-training and inference steering.
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BASIS: Batchwise Advantage Estimation from Single-Rollout Information Sharing for LLM Reasoning
BASIS achieves superior value estimation and policy optimization in LLM reasoning with single rollouts by batchwise information sharing compared to existing single and multi-rollout methods.
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DISA: Offline Importance Sampling for Distribution-Matching LLM-RL
DISA decouples partition function estimation using offline importance sampling for distribution-matching LLM-RL, matching or exceeding online baselines like FlowRL on math and code benchmarks while retaining more strategy diversity.
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The Attacker in the Mirror: Breaking Self-Consistency in Safety via Anchored Bipolicy Self-Play
Anchored Bipolicy Self-Play trains role-specific LoRA adapters on a frozen base model to break self-consistency collapse in self-play red-teaming, yielding up to 100x parameter efficiency and stronger safety on Qwen2.5 models.
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AffectGPT-RL: Revealing Roles of Reinforcement Learning in Open-Vocabulary Emotion Recognition
AffectGPT-RL applies reinforcement learning to optimize non-differentiable emotion wheel metrics in open-vocabulary multimodal emotion recognition, yielding performance gains and state-of-the-art results on basic emotion recognition benchmarks.
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EXPO-SQL: Execution-based Clause-level Policy Optimization for Text-to-SQL
EXPO-SQL improves Text-to-SQL by using clause-level rewards derived from execution error messages and incremental clause execution instead of uniform query-level rewards.
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EVPO: Explained Variance Policy Optimization for Adaptive Critic Utilization in LLM Post-Training
EVPO adaptively switches between critic-based and batch-mean advantage estimation using batch-level explained variance to provably achieve no greater variance than the better of PPO or GRPO at every step.
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ReflectMT: Internalizing Reflection for Efficient and High-Quality Machine Translation
ReflectMT internalizes reflection via two-stage RL to enable direct high-quality machine translation that outperforms explicit reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 on WMT24 while using 94% fewer tokens.
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Freshness-Aware Prioritized Experience Replay for LLM/VLM Reinforcement Learning
Freshness-Aware PER augments prioritized experience replay with exponential age decay based on effective sample size to enable successful reuse of trajectories in LLM and VLM reinforcement learning, outperforming on-policy baselines on agentic tasks.
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Low-rank Optimization Trajectories Modeling for LLM RLVR Acceleration
NExt accelerates RLVR training for LLMs by nonlinearly extrapolating low-rank parameter trajectories extracted from LoRA runs.
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Retrieval Augmented Conversational Recommendation with Reinforcement Learning
RAR retrieves candidate items from a 300k-movie corpus then uses LLM generation with RL feedback to produce context-aware recommendations that outperform baselines on benchmarks.
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Small Generalizable Prompt Predictive Models Can Steer Efficient RL Post-Training of Large Reasoning Models
GPS trains a small model on optimization history to predict prompt difficulty and select intermediate-difficulty diverse batches, yielding better training efficiency, final performance, and test-time allocation than baselines on reasoning benchmarks.
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The Art of Scaling Reinforcement Learning Compute for LLMs
A 400k+ GPU-hour study shows RL scaling in LLMs follows predictable sigmoidal trajectories, with most design choices affecting efficiency rather than the performance asymptote, enabling accurate large-scale predictions via the ScaleRL recipe.
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Token Buncher: Shielding LLMs from Harmful Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tuning
TokenBuncher constrains response entropy via entropy-as-reward RL and a Token Noiser to stop harmful RL fine-tuning while keeping benign performance intact.
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The Flip Side of RLHF: On-Policy Feedback for Reward Model Self-Supervised Improvement
SAVE enables self-supervised reward model improvement by anchoring on-policy response grading with a prompt-specific value head, computing advantages, filtering ambiguous samples, and updating via contrastive objective.
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CRPO: Character-centric Group Relative Policy Optimization for Role-aware Reasoning in Role-playing Agents
CRPO modifies GRPO with three mechanisms—decoupling task and style rewards, adapting constraints to character complexity, and using generic responses as negative baselines—to improve character fidelity in role-playing agents.
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CLORE: Content-Level Optimization for Reasoning Efficiency
CLORE augments correct on-policy rollouts by deleting repetitive and irrelevant segments then optimizes with auxiliary DPO to improve accuracy-efficiency trade-off on math benchmarks.
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Learning Spatiotemporal Sensitivity in Video LLMs via Counterfactual Reinforcement Learning
CRPO applies counterfactual videos and a cross-branch relation reward in RL post-training to reduce shortcut reliance in Video LLMs, with gains shown on the new DyBench paired benchmark.
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Advantage Collapse in Group Relative Policy Optimization: Diagnosis and Mitigation
GRPO suffers advantage collapse on uniform-reward groups; ACR quantifies it and AVSPO adds virtual samples to restore gradients, yielding 4-6% accuracy gains on math benchmarks across 0.5B-14B models.
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PopuLoRA: Co-Evolving LLM Populations for Reasoning Self-Play
PopuLoRA shows that co-evolving populations of LoRA adapters through cross-evaluated self-play can outperform compute-matched single-agent baselines on multiple code and math reasoning benchmarks.
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DualKV: Shared-Prompt Flash Attention for Efficient RL Training with Large Rollouts and Long Contexts
DualKV eliminates redundant prompt replication in RL training attention kernels via fused dual-KV CUDA operations and token repacking, delivering 1.63-3.82x policy-update speedups while remaining mathematically equivalent to standard attention.
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Internalizing Curriculum Judgment for LLM Reinforcement Fine-Tuning
METIS internalizes curriculum judgment in LLM reinforcement fine-tuning by predicting within-prompt reward variance via in-context learning and jointly optimizing with a self-judgment reward, yielding superior performance and up to 67% faster convergence across math, code, and agent benchmarks.
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AIPO: Learning to Reason from Active Interaction
AIPO adds active multi-agent consultation (Verify, Knowledge, Reasoning agents) plus custom importance sampling to RLVR training so LLMs expand their reasoning boundary and then operate without the agents.
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Experience Sharing in Mutual Reinforcement Learning for Heterogeneous Language Models
Mutual Reinforcement Learning allows heterogeneous LLMs to exchange experience through mechanisms like Peer Rollout Pooling, Cross-Policy GRPO Advantage Sharing, and Success-Gated Transfer, with outcome-level sharing identified as favorable on the stability-support trade-off.
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Bridging Textual Profiles and Latent User Embeddings for Personalization
BLUE aligns LLM-generated textual user profiles with embedding-based recommendation objectives via reinforcement learning and next-item text supervision, yielding better zero-shot performance and cross-domain transfer than baselines.
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Beyond Uniform Credit Assignment: Selective Eligibility Traces for RLVR
S-trace adds sparse eligibility traces to RLVR that mask low-entropy tokens, outperforming GRPO by 0.49-3.16% pass@16 on Qwen3 models while improving sample and token efficiency.
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Kernelized Advantage Estimation: From Nonparametric Statistics to LLM Reasoning
Kernel smoothing enables accurate low-variance value and gradient estimates for policy optimization in LLM reasoning under tight sampling constraints per prompt.
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From $P(y|x)$ to $P(y)$: Investigating Reinforcement Learning in Pre-train Space
PreRL applies reward-driven updates to P(y) in pre-train space, uses Negative Sample Reinforcement to prune bad reasoning paths and boost reflection, and combines with standard RL in Dual Space RL to outperform baselines on reasoning tasks.
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From Relevance to Authority: Authority-aware Generative Retrieval in Web Search Engines
AuthGR is the first generative retriever to explicitly incorporate document authority alongside relevance using multimodal scoring and progressive training, yielding efficiency gains and real-world engagement improvements.
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ReSS: Learning Reasoning Models for Tabular Data Prediction via Symbolic Scaffold
ReSS extracts decision paths from trees as scaffolds to guide LLM reasoning generation, fine-tunes the LLM on the resulting dataset with scaffold-invariant augmentation, and reports up to 10% gains on medical and financial tabular benchmarks with new faithfulness metrics.
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Lightning OPD: Efficient Post-Training for Large Reasoning Models with Offline On-Policy Distillation
Lightning OPD is an offline on-policy distillation method that matches standard OPD performance at 4x efficiency by enforcing teacher consistency between SFT and distillation phases.
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ReRec: Reasoning-Augmented LLM-based Recommendation Assistant via Reinforcement Fine-tuning
ReRec uses reinforcement fine-tuning with dual-graph reward shaping, reasoning-aware advantage estimation, and online curriculum scheduling to improve LLM reasoning and performance in recommendation tasks.
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Walk the Talk: Bridging the Reasoning-Action Gap for Thinking with Images via Multimodal Agentic Policy Optimization
MAPO improves multimodal chain-of-thought reasoning by requiring explicit textual descriptions of visual tool results and using a novel advantage estimator that combines semantic alignment with task rewards.
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Target Policy Optimization
TPO constructs a target distribution q proportional to the old policy times exp(utility) and trains the policy to match it via cross-entropy, matching or beating PPO and GRPO especially under sparse rewards.
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AgentGL: Towards Agentic Graph Learning with LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
AgentGL is an RL-driven LLM agent framework for agentic graph learning that uses graph-native tools and curriculum training to outperform GraphLLM and GraphRAG baselines by up to 17.5% on node classification and 28.4% on link prediction across text-attributed graph benchmarks.
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MICA: Multi-granularity Intertemporal Credit Assignment for Long-Horizon Emotional Support Dialogue
MICA combines incremental per-turn distance rewards and Monte Carlo returns from a shared potential function over user support states to create a mixed advantage signal that enables stable multi-turn RL optimization for emotional support dialogues.
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rePIRL: Learn PRM with Inverse RL for LLM Reasoning
rePIRL learns effective process reward models for LLM reasoning via a dual policy-PRM update process inspired by inverse RL, unifying online and offline methods with reported gains over prior approaches on math and coding datasets.
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GDPO: Group reward-Decoupled Normalization Policy Optimization for Multi-reward RL Optimization
GDPO decouples per-reward normalization in multi-reward RL to avoid advantage collapse and improve convergence over GRPO on tool-calling, math, and coding tasks.
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SCALER:Synthetic Scalable Adaptive Learning Environment for Reasoning
SCALER creates adaptive synthetic environments for RL-based LLM reasoning training that outperforms fixed-dataset baselines with more stable long-term progress.
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PaTaRM: Bridging Pairwise and Pointwise Signals via Preference-Aware Task-Adaptive Reward Modeling
PaTaRM converts pairwise preference data into pointwise reward signals via a novel PAR mechanism and task-adaptive rubrics, reporting 8.7% gains on RewardBench/RMBench and 13.6% relative RLHF improvement.
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Mitigating Visual Context Degradation in Large Multimodal Models: A Training-Free Decoupled Agentic Framework
DRP decouples reasoning from perception in LMMs by using an LLM reasoner to query an LMM observer for visual details as needed, reducing visual grounding loss.
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SPaCe: Unlocking Sample-Efficient Large Language Models Training With Self-Pace Curriculum Learning
SPaCe uses semantic clustering to shrink training sets and a multi-armed bandit to adaptively select samples, matching or beating baselines on reasoning benchmarks with up to 100x fewer examples.
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Agentic Reinforced Policy Optimization
ARPO adds entropy-based adaptive rollouts and stepwise advantage attribution to RL for LLM agents, outperforming prior trajectory-level methods on 13 benchmarks with half the tool budget.
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MemAgent: Reshaping Long-Context LLM with Multi-Conv RL-based Memory Agent
MemAgent uses multi-conversation RL to train a memory agent that reads text in segments and overwrites memory, extrapolating from 8K training to 3.5M token QA with under 5% loss and 95%+ on 512K RULER.
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MEM1: Learning to Synergize Memory and Reasoning for Efficient Long-Horizon Agents
MEM1 uses end-to-end RL to learn constant-memory agents that update a shared state for memory and reasoning, delivering 3.5x better performance and 3.7x lower memory use than larger baselines on long-horizon QA and shopping tasks.
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VAPO: Efficient and Reliable Reinforcement Learning for Advanced Reasoning Tasks
VAPO achieves 60.4 on AIME 2024 with Qwen 32B, outperforming prior methods by over 10 points through targeted fixes for value bias, sequence length variation, and sparse rewards.
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Cognitive Behaviors that Enable Self-Improving Reasoners, or, Four Habits of Highly Effective STaRs
Language models that naturally exhibit verification, backtracking, subgoal setting, and backward chaining improve substantially during RL on verifiable tasks, and these behaviors can be instilled via priming with reasoning-focused examples or filtered pretraining to enable self-improvement.
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SingGuard: A Policy-Adaptive Multimodal LLM Guardrail with Dynamic Reasoning
SingGuard introduces a policy-adaptive multimodal LLM guardrail with dynamic reasoning regimes and SingGuard-Bench, reporting SOTA F1 scores across 35 datasets and improved policy-following accuracy under runtime shifts.