S. Li
Publications
STAPO: Stabilizing Reinforcement Learning for LLMs by Silencing Rare Spurious Tokens
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has significantly improved large language model reasoning, but existing RL fine-tuning methods rely heavily on heuristic techniques such as entropy regularization and reweighting to maintain stability. In practice, they often suffer from late-stage performance collapse, leading to degraded reasoning quality and unstable training. Our analysis shows that the magnitude of token-wise policy gradients in RL is negatively correlated with token probability and local policy entropy. We find that training instability can be caused by a tiny fraction of tokens, approximately 0.01%, which we term spurious tokens. When such tokens appear in correct responses, they contribute little to the reasoning outcome but inherit the full sequence-level reward, leading to abnormally amplified gradient updates. To mitigate this instability, we design an S2T (silencing spurious tokens) mechanism to efficiently identify spurious tokens through characteristic signals with low probability, low entropy, and positive advantage, and then suppress their gradient perturbations during optimization. Incorporating this mechanism into a group-based objective, we propose Spurious-Token-Aware Policy Optimization (STAPO), which promotes stable and effective large-scale model refinement. Across six mathematical reasoning benchmarks using Qwen 1.7B, 8B, and 14B base models, STAPO consistently demonstrates superior entropy stability and achieves an average performance improvement of 7.13% ($ρ_{\mathrm{T}}$=1.0, top-p=1.0) and 3.69% ($ρ_{\mathrm{T}}$=0.7, top-p=0.9) over GRPO, 20-Entropy, and JustRL.
Mean Flow Policy with Instantaneous Velocity Constraint for One-step Action Generation
Learning expressive and efficient policy functions is a promising direction in reinforcement learning (RL). While flow-based policies have recently proven effective in modeling complex action distributions with a fast deterministic sampling process, they still face a trade-off between expressiveness and computational burden, which is typically controlled by the number of flow steps. In this work, we propose mean velocity policy (MVP), a new generative policy function that models the mean velocity field to achieve the fastest one-step action generation. To ensure its high expressiveness, an instantaneous velocity constraint (IVC) is introduced on the mean velocity field during training. We theoretically prove that this design explicitly serves as a crucial boundary condition, thereby improving learning accuracy and enhancing policy expressiveness. Empirically, our MVP achieves state-of-the-art success rates across several challenging robotic manipulation tasks from Robomimic and OGBench. It also delivers substantial improvements in training and inference speed over existing flow-based policy baselines.