Beyond the Stability-Exploration Dilemma: Environmental Regularization for LLM Policy Optimization
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-K...
| Authors | Xianlei Zhou, Xiangdi Meng, Yu He et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 24 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 25 August 2026 |
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