Tianyi Wang
Publications
Trust Your Memory: Verifiable Control of Smart Homes through Reinforcement Learning with Multi-dimensional Rewards
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a key foundation for enabling personalized smart home experiences. While existing studies have explored how smart home assistants understand user queries to control devices in real time, their ability to perform memory-driven device control remains challenging from both evaluation and methodological perspectives. In terms of evaluation, existing benchmarks either focus on immediate device control or general open-domain memory retrieval tasks, and therefore cannot effectively evaluate a model's ability to perform memory-driven device control. Methodologically, while memory-driven device control can be approached using Reinforcement Learning, conventional RL methods generally rely on outcome-based supervision (i.e., whether the final task is achieved). This lack of intermediate feedback can lead to sub-optimal performance or local failures in fine-grained memory management tasks (adding, updating, deleting, and utilizing). To address these issues, we first release MemHomeLife, built from anonymized real-world long-term user interaction logs. To enable more fine-grained evaluation of different memory-related subtasks, we further construct MemHome, the first benchmark designed to systematically evaluate memory-driven device control in smart home scenarios.
SPPO: Sequence-Level PPO for Long-Horizon Reasoning Tasks
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is central to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) in reasoning tasks with verifiable rewards. However, standard token-level PPO struggles in this setting due to the instability of temporal credit assignment over long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) horizons and the prohibitive memory cost of the value model. While critic-free alternatives like GRPO mitigate these issues, they incur significant computational overhead by requiring multiple samples for baseline estimation, severely limiting training throughput. In this paper, we introduce Sequence-Level PPO (SPPO), a scalable algorithm that harmonizes the sample efficiency of PPO with the stability of outcome-based updates. SPPO reformulates the reasoning process as a Sequence-Level Contextual Bandit problem, employing a decoupled scalar value function to derive low-variance advantage signals without multi-sampling. Extensive experiments on mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that SPPO significantly surpasses standard PPO and matches the performance of computation-heavy group-based methods, offering a resource-efficient framework for aligning reasoning LLMs.
DyJR: Preserving Diversity in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards via Dynamic Jensen-Shannon Replay
While Reinforcement Learning (RL) enhances Large Language Model reasoning, on-policy algorithms like GRPO are sample-inefficient as they discard past rollouts. Existing experience replay methods address this by reusing accurate samples for direct policy updates, but this often incurs high computational costs and causes mode collapse via overfitting. We argue that historical data should prioritize sustaining diversity rather than simply reinforcing accuracy. To this end, we propose Dynamic Jensen-Shannon Replay (DyJR), a simple yet effective regularization framework using a dynamic reference distribution from recent trajectories. DyJR introduces two innovations: (1) A Time-Sensitive Dynamic Buffer that uses FIFO and adaptive sizing to retain only temporally proximal samples, synchronizing with model evolution; and (2) Jensen-Shannon Divergence Regularization, which replaces direct gradient updates with a distributional constraint to prevent diversity collapse. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and Text-to-SQL benchmarks demonstrate that DyJR significantly outperforms GRPO as well as baselines such as RLEP and Ex-GRPO, while maintaining training efficiency comparable to the original GRPO. Furthermore, from the perspective of Rank-$k$ token probability evolution, we show that DyJR enhances diversity and mitigates over-reliance on Rank-1 tokens, elucidating how specific sub-modules of DyJR influence the training dynamics.