Papers › REINFORCE++: A Simple and Efficient Approach for Aligning Large Language Models

REINFORCE++: A Simple and Efficient Approach for Aligning Large Language Models

4 Jan 2025arXiv:2501.03262archive 2025-07-28

Jian Hu

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a critical approach for aligning large language models with human preferences, witnessing rapid algorithmic evolution through methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), REINFORCE Leave One-Out (RLOO), ReMax, and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We present REINFORCE++, an enhanced variant of the classical REINFORCE algorithm that incorporates key optimization techniques from PPO while eliminating the need for a critic network. REINFORCE++ achieves three primary objectives: (1) simplicity (2) enhanced training stability, and (3) reduced computational overhead. Through extensive empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that REINFORCE++ exhibits superior stability compared to GRPO and achieves greater computational efficiency than PPO while maintaining comparable performance. The implementation is available at \url{https://github.com/OpenRLHF/OpenRLHF}.

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openrlhf/openrlhf officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
OpenLLMAI/OpenLLaMA2 mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
OpenLLMAI/OpenRLHF mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
gair-nlp/maye mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
theeighthday/seekworld mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Computational Efficiency

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Entropy RegularizationPPOREINFORCE

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