Off-Policy Learning to Reason Works Because It Is More Pessimistic Than You Think
For researchers improving reasoning in large language models via reinforcement learning, this provides a theoretical understanding and practical improvement for off-policy algorithms.
The paper explains why off-policy learning works for reasoning in large language models by showing that effective off-policy objectives induce implicit pessimism, making target policies more conservative. It proposes a principled modification to stabilize the induced distribution and improve off-policy learning.
Large scale reinforcement learning has become a central tool for improving reasoning in large language models. At this scale, generation is often lagged or asynchronous, so updates are performed on data collected by older policies. This makes learning inherently off-policy. Most existing approaches nevertheless remain rooted in PPO-style trust-region objectives, treating training as approximately on-policy and using importance weights to correct distribution mismatch. These corrections can introduce high variance, destabilize optimization, and accelerate entropy collapse. Recent work suggests an alternative: rather than correcting the mismatch, one can embrace off-policy data and remove importance weights, often yielding stronger algorithms. In this paper, we provide an intuitive construction of off-policy objectives that include successful off-policy objectives and show that their effectiveness can be understood through implicit pessimism: they optimize toward target policies that are more conservative than their nominal objectives suggest. This perspective explains why some particular implementation choices improve stability: they implicitly control the effective target distribution. We then propose a principled modification that stabilize this induced distribution and improve off-policy learning.