Artificial Intelligence · 04.08.2026, 09:03 UTC
Beyond On-Policy Exploration: Integrating External Policy Rollouts for Reinforcement Learning in Diffusion Language Models
| Schweregrad | info |
|---|---|
| Kategorie | Artificial Intelligence |
| Quelle | arXiv cs.LG ↗ |
| Veröffentlicht | 04.08.2026 UTC |
Sicherheitsmeldung mit Schweregrad noch nicht bewertet. Technische Details im Tab „Originaltext“; empfohlene Schritte in der Checkliste.
arXiv:2608.01717v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent reinforcement learning methods for diffusion large language models (dLLMs) commonly rely on on-policy rollouts generated by the target dLLM itself. When successful on-policy rollouts are scarce, however, on-policy training may receive little positive reward and make only limited progress. To mitigate this problem, we explore incorporating higher-reward rollouts generated by a stronger external policy alongside on-policy rollouts from the target dLLM. However, directly incorporating these external rollouts introduces two practical challenges: differences in rollout length and instability when jointly processing rewards from on-policy and external rollouts. To address these challenges, we propose External Rollout Integration with Length Control and Source-Specific Processing (ERILS), which controls external-rollout length and processes the rewards of on-policy and external rollouts separately. Experiments on Sudoku, Countdown, and MATH500 under zero-shot evaluation show that ERILS improves multi-sample performance across all three tasks, with the largest gains on Sudoku. On Sudoku, ERILS achieves 98.4% best-of-4 completion accuracy, compared with 40.3% for the strongest baseline. ERILS also maintains approximately 90% deterministic single-completion accuracy on Sudoku across generation lengths of 128, 256, and 512 tokens. Our component analysis further shows that length-controlled external rollouts are more effective than uncontrolled external rollouts, and that source-specific reward processing avoids the training …