Low-Rank Adaptation for Critic Learning in Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning
Yuan Zhuang, Yuexin Bian, Sihong He, Jie Feng, Qing Su, Songyang Han, Jonathan Petit, Shihao Ji 等 10 位作者
AI 速览：作者提出将 LoRA 作为从零训练评论家的结构正则化手段，冻结随机初始化的基矩阵、只训练低秩适配器，并在连续控制任务上评估。
Scaling critic capacity is a promising direction for improving off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). However, recent work shows that larger critics are prone to overfitting and instability in replay-based bootstrapped training. In this paper, we propose using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) as a structural regularizer for critic learning from scratch. Our approach freezes randomly initialized base matrices and optimizes only the corresponding low-rank adapters, thereby constraining the learned weight changes to low-rank residuals. We evaluate our method on state-based continuous-control tasks, using SAC with SimbaV2 and BRC on DMC-Hard, and FastTD3 with its SimbaV2 variant on IsaacLab. Empirically, LoRA reduces critic loss during training and improves overall policy performance, achieving the best or competitive results on most tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our low-rank updates provide a simple and effective form of structural regularization for critic learning in off-policy RL.
Shrey Pandit SalesForce.com, Austin Xu Anthropic, Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Yifei Ming Salesforce AI Research, Caiming Xiong Salesforce Research, Shafiq Joty Nanyang Technological University and SalesForce.com
Large language model (LLM)-based reasoning systems have recently achieved gold medal-level performance in the IMO 2025 competition, writing mathematical proofs where, to receive full credit, each step must be not only correct but also sufficiently supported. To train LLM-based reasoners in such challenging, open-ended settings, strong verifiers capable of catching step-level mistakes are necessary prerequisites. We introduce Hard2Verify, a human-annotated, step-level verification benchmark produced with over 500 hours of human labor. Hard2Verify is designed to rigorously assess step-level verifiers at the frontier: Verifiers must provide step-level annotations or identify the first error in responses generated by frontier LLMs for very recent, challenging, and open-ended math questions. We evaluate 29 generative critics and process reward models, demonstrating that, beyond a few standouts, open-source verifiers lag closed source models. We subsequently analyze what drives poor performance in step-level verification, the impacts of scaling verifier compute, as well as fundamental questions such as self-verification and verification-generation dynamics.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Bowen Ding, Yuhan Chen, Jiayang Lyu, Jiyao Yuan, Qi Zhu Huawei Technologies Ltd., Shuangshuang Tian, Dantong Zhu Central South University, Futing Wang Westlake University 等 12 位作者
Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) dominate the post-training landscape for mathematical reasoning, yet differ fundamentally in their reliance on expert trajectories. To understand the optimal way to harness these trajectories for maximizing performance, we propose the Plasticity-Ceiling Framework. This framework empirically grounds the post-training landscape by decomposing the final performance ceiling into the foundational SFT performance and the subsequent RL plasticity (i.e., the maximum improvement via RL). Through extensive benchmarking, we establish the Sequential SFT-then-RL pipeline as the superior standard, overcoming the stability and premature convergence deficits inherent in synchronized approaches. Furthermore, we derive precise scaling guidelines: (1) Transitioning to RL at the Stable or Mild Overfitting Regime of SFT maximizes the final ceiling by securing a robust SFT foundation with substantial RL plasticity; (2) Refuting the “Less is More” hypothesis in SFT-then-RL scaling, we demonstrate that Data Scale determines the primary post-training potential, while Trajectory Difficulty acts as a performance multiplier; and (3) The Minimum Validation Loss of SFT serves as a reliable indicator for selecting the expert trajectories that maximize the ultimate performance ceiling. Our findings provide actionable guidelines for extracting maximum value from expert trajectories.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable success on reasoning-intensive tasks such as mathematics and programming. However, their enhanced reasoning capabilities do not necessarily translate to improved safety performance—and in some cases, may even degrade it. This raises an important research question: how should we enhance the safety of LRMs? In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical study on how to enhance the safety of LRMs through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Our investigation begins with an unexpected observation: directly distilling safe responses from DeepSeek-R1 fails to significantly enhance safety. We analyze this phenomenon and identify five key risky patterns that contribute to it. We then demonstrate that explicitly addressing these issues during the data distillation process can lead to substantial safety improvements. Next, we explore whether a long and complex reasoning process is necessary for achieving safety. Interestingly, we find that simply using short or template-based reasoning process can attain comparable safety performance. These findings prompt a deeper reflection on the role of reasoning in ensuring safety. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive ablation study to reveal the impact of different training configurations. Overall, we hope our empirical study could provide a more holistic picture on enhancing the safety of LRMs.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表