29.5CLMay 25
DVAO: Dynamic Variance-adaptive Advantage Optimization for Multi-reward Reinforcement LearningGuochao Jiang, Jingyi Song, Guofeng Quan et al.
Reinforcement Learning has become a standard paradigm for aligning Large Language Models with human intent and task requirements. While Group Relative Policy Optimization offers an efficient, value-model-free alternative to Proximal Policy Optimization, adapting it to real-world multi-reward settings remains challenging. Standard scalarization practices, such as Reward Combination and Advantage Combination, suffer from significant drawbacks: Reward Combination frequently generates advantages with excessively large squared magnitudes that lead to training instability, while Advantage Combination relies on static hyperparameters and ignores cross-objective correlations. To address these limitations, we propose Dynamic Variance-adaptive Advantage Optimization (DVAO), which dynamically adjusts combination weights based on the empirical reward variance of each objective within a rollout group, effectively up-weighting objectives with a stronger learning signal while suppressing noisy ones. We mathematically prove that DVAO maintains bounded advantage magnitudes for stable training and introduces a self-adaptive cross-objective regularization mechanism. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning and tool-use benchmarks using Qwen3 and Qwen2.5 models demonstrate that DVAO significantly outperforms baseline methods, achieving a superior multi-objective Pareto frontier and robust training stability.
AIJan 17, 2025
AirRAG: Autonomous Strategic Planning and Reasoning Steer Retrieval Augmented GenerationWenfeng Feng, Chuzhan Hao, Yuewei Zhang et al.
Leveraging the autonomous decision-making capabilities of large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated superior performance in reasoning tasks. However, despite the success of iterative or agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques, these methods are often constrained to a single solution space when confronted with complex problems. In this paper, we propose a novel thinking pattern in RAG that integrates autonomous strategic planning with efficient reasoning actions, significantly activating intrinsic reasoning capabilities and expanding the solution space of specific tasks via Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), which we refer to as AirRAG. Specifically, our approach designs five fundamental reasoning actions, which are expanded to a broad tree-based reasoning space using MCTS. The approach also incorporates self-consistency verification to explore potential reasoning paths and inference scaling law. Additionally, computationally optimal strategies are employed to allocate more inference resources to key actions, thereby enhancing overall performance. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of AirRAG, showing significant performance gains on complex question-answering datasets. Furthermore, AirRAG is flexible and lightweight, making it easy to integrate with other advanced technologies and models.