DGRO: Enhancing LLM Reasoning via Exploration-Exploitation Control and Reward Variance Management

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Su, Xuerui, Guo, Liya, Wang, Yue, Zhu, Yi, Ma, Zhiming, Wang, Zun, Liu, Yuting
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915292656959488
author Su, Xuerui
Guo, Liya
Wang, Yue
Zhu, Yi
Ma, Zhiming
Wang, Zun
Liu, Yuting
author_facet Su, Xuerui
Guo, Liya
Wang, Yue
Zhu, Yi
Ma, Zhiming
Wang, Zun
Liu, Yuting
contents Inference scaling further accelerates Large Language Models (LLMs) toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), with large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) to unleash long Chain-of-Thought reasoning. Most contemporary reasoning approaches usually rely on handcrafted rule-based reward functions. However, the tarde-offs of exploration and exploitation in RL algorithms involves multiple complex considerations, and the theoretical and empirical impacts of manually designed reward functions remain insufficiently explored. In this paper, we propose Decoupled Group Reward Optimization (DGRO), a general RL algorithm for LLM reasoning. On the one hand, DGRO decouples the traditional regularization coefficient into two independent hyperparameters: one scales the policy gradient term, and the other regulates the distance from the sampling policy. This decoupling not only enables precise control over balancing exploration and exploitation, but also can be seamlessly extended to Online Policy Mirror Descent (OPMD) algorithms in Kimi k1.5 and Direct Reward Optimization. On the other hand, we observe that reward variance significantly affects both convergence speed and final model performance. We conduct both theoretical analysis and extensive empirical validation to assess DGRO, including a detailed ablation study that investigates its performance and optimization dynamics. Experimental results show that DGRO achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Logic dataset with an average accuracy of 96.9\%, and demonstrates strong generalization across mathematical benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12951
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DGRO: Enhancing LLM Reasoning via Exploration-Exploitation Control and Reward Variance Management
Su, Xuerui
Guo, Liya
Wang, Yue
Zhu, Yi
Ma, Zhiming
Wang, Zun
Liu, Yuting
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Inference scaling further accelerates Large Language Models (LLMs) toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), with large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) to unleash long Chain-of-Thought reasoning. Most contemporary reasoning approaches usually rely on handcrafted rule-based reward functions. However, the tarde-offs of exploration and exploitation in RL algorithms involves multiple complex considerations, and the theoretical and empirical impacts of manually designed reward functions remain insufficiently explored. In this paper, we propose Decoupled Group Reward Optimization (DGRO), a general RL algorithm for LLM reasoning. On the one hand, DGRO decouples the traditional regularization coefficient into two independent hyperparameters: one scales the policy gradient term, and the other regulates the distance from the sampling policy. This decoupling not only enables precise control over balancing exploration and exploitation, but also can be seamlessly extended to Online Policy Mirror Descent (OPMD) algorithms in Kimi k1.5 and Direct Reward Optimization. On the other hand, we observe that reward variance significantly affects both convergence speed and final model performance. We conduct both theoretical analysis and extensive empirical validation to assess DGRO, including a detailed ablation study that investigates its performance and optimization dynamics. Experimental results show that DGRO achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Logic dataset with an average accuracy of 96.9\%, and demonstrates strong generalization across mathematical benchmarks.
title DGRO: Enhancing LLM Reasoning via Exploration-Exploitation Control and Reward Variance Management
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12951