arXiv:2602.05165v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, dominant approaches like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) face critical stability challenges: they suffer from high estimator variance under computational constraints (small group sizes) and vanishing gradient signals in saturated failure regimes where all responses yield identical zero rewards. To address this, we propose Empirical Bayes Policy Optimization (EBPO), a novel framework that regularizes local group-based baselines by borrowing strength from the policy's accumulated global statistics. Instead of estimating baselines in isolation, EBPO employs a shrinkage estimator that dynamically balances local group statistics with a global prior updated via Welford's online algorithm. Theoretically, we demonstrate that EBPO guarantees strictly lower Mean Squared Error (MSE), bounded entropy decay, and non-vanishing penalty signals in failure scenarios compared to GRPO. Empirically, EBPO consistently outperforms GRPO and other established baselines across diverse benchmarks, including AIME and OlympiadBench. Notably, EBPO exhibits superior training stability, achieving high-performance gains even with small group sizes, and benefits significantly from difficulty-stratified curriculum learning.

arXiv:2602.14351v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model-based reinforcement learning promises strong sample efficiency but often underperforms in practice due to compounding model error, unimodal world models that average over multi-modal dynamics, and overconfident predictions that bias learning. We introduce WIMLE, a model-based method that extends Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (IMLE) to the model-based RL framework to learn stochastic, multi-modal world models without iterative sampling and to estimate predictive uncertainty via ensembles and latent sampling. During training, WIMLE weights each synthetic transition by its predicted confidence, preserving useful model rollouts while attenuating bias from uncertain predictions and enabling stable learning. Across $40$ continuous-control tasks spanning DeepMind Control, MyoSuite, and HumanoidBench, WIMLE achieves superior sample efficiency and competitive or better asymptotic performance than strong model-free and model-based baselines. Notably, on the challenging Humanoid-run task, WIMLE improves sample efficiency by over $50$\% relative to the strongest competitor, and on HumanoidBench it solves $8$ of $14$ tasks (versus $4$ for BRO and $5$ for SimbaV2). These results highlight the value of IMLE-based multi-modality and uncertainty-aware weighting for stable model-based RL.