Tianyu Qi
Author directory2026
Beyond the Stability-Exploration Dilemma: Environmental Regularization for LLM Policy Optimization
Xianlei Zhou | Xiangdi Meng | Yu He | Tianyu Qi | Shuyan Guan | Xianli Zhang | Jian Zhang | Xin Li | Qika Lin | Jun Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xianlei Zhou | Xiangdi Meng | Yu He | Tianyu Qi | Shuyan Guan | Xianli Zhang | Jian Zhang | Xin Li | Qika Lin | Jun Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Policy optimization (PO) for Large Language Models faces a stability–exploration trade-off, currently mediated by an action-side Policy-KL regularizer. This puts practitioners in a double bind: keeping Policy-KL constrains response behavior and consumes the action-side exploration budget, while dropping it leaves the optimization without an explicit drift control. We argue for an alternative that breaks the dilemma by moving regularization to the input side. As training progresses, the distribution over training queries induced by the current policy drifts unchecked from its pre-RL reference distribution.
Concretely, Environment-Regularized Policy Optimization (ERPO) introduces a Query-KL (QKL) term that bounds this query distribution shift, together with a dataset-static reference-derived per-query weight that biases each per-query update toward queries typical under the reference. The QKL gradient flows strictly through the query likelihood; the response score function used by policy-gradient estimators does not appear in the QKL term, so QKL exerts no direct gradient pressure on the response distribution—exploration is preserved. ERPO plugs into GRPO/PPO/REINFORCE-style pipelines without additional forward passes. On six mathematical reasoning benchmarks, ERPO replaces the standard Policy-KL regularizer while achieving effective control over query distribution drift, delivering stronger accuracy and substantially more stable behavior under high-temperature decoding and long-horizon training.
Concretely, Environment-Regularized Policy Optimization (ERPO) introduces a Query-KL (QKL) term that bounds this query distribution shift, together with a dataset-static reference-derived per-query weight that biases each per-query update toward queries typical under the reference. The QKL gradient flows strictly through the query likelihood; the response score function used by policy-gradient estimators does not appear in the QKL term, so QKL exerts no direct gradient pressure on the response distribution—exploration is preserved. ERPO plugs into GRPO/PPO/REINFORCE-style pipelines without additional forward passes. On six mathematical reasoning benchmarks, ERPO replaces the standard Policy-KL regularizer while achieving effective control over query distribution drift, delivering stronger accuracy and substantially more stable behavior under high-temperature decoding and long-horizon training.
2025
ResoFilter: Fine-grained Synthetic Data Filtering for Large Language Models through Data-Parameter Resonance Analysis
Zeao Tu | Xiangdi Meng | Yu He | Zihan Yao | Tianyu Qi | Jun Liu | Ming Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Zeao Tu | Xiangdi Meng | Yu He | Zihan Yao | Tianyu Qi | Jun Liu | Ming Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable effectiveness across various domains, with data augmentation methods utilizing GPT for synthetic data generation becoming prevalent. However, the quality and utility of augmented data remain questionable, and current methods lack clear metrics for evaluating data characteristics. To address these challenges, we propose ResoFilter, a novel method that integrates models, data, and tasks to refine datasets. ResoFilter leverages the fine-tuning process to obtain Data-Parameter features for data selection, offering improved interpretability by representing data characteristics through model weights. Our experiments demonstrate that ResoFilter achieves comparable results to full-scale fine-tuning using only half the data in mathematical tasks and exhibits strong generalization across different models and domains. This method provides valuable insights for constructing synthetic datasets and evaluating high-quality data, offering a promising solution for enhancing data augmentation techniques and improving training dataset quality for LLMs. For reproducibility, we will release our code and data upon acceptance.