EEPO: Exploration-Enhanced Policy Optimization via Sample-Then-Forget

2025-10-07

AI Summary

In verifiable reward reinforcement learning (RLVR), large language models (LLMs) frequently suffer from over-exploitation, leading to policy entropy collapse and diminished exploration. To address this, we propose a two-stage rollout framework coupled with an adaptive policy forgetting mechanism: the first stage generates diverse candidate responses, while the second stage applies “post-sample forgetting” to disrupt self-reinforcing dominant behavioral patterns; concurrently, policy entropy is dynamically regulated to enable lightweight, differentiable exploration enhancement. Evaluated on five reasoning benchmarks, our method significantly outperforms GRPO, achieving average relative performance gains of 24.3%, 33.0%, and 10.4% on Qwen2.5-3B, Llama3.2-3B-Instruct, and Qwen3-8B-Base, respectively. This work constitutes the first systematic integration of policy forgetting into the LLM-RLVR paradigm, effectively broadening the output space exploration scope.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Reinforcement Learning
• Natural Language Processing: (Large) Language Models
• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Search Tool Learning with LLM: Teaching LLMs to invoke search and make use of retrieved information
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Large Language Models (LLM) for user modeling and recommendation
• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs

Abstract

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models (LLMs). Current RLVR methods often overemphasize exploitation, leading to entropy collapse, diminished exploratory capacity, and ultimately limited performance gains. Although techniques that increase policy stochasticity can promote exploration, they frequently fail to escape dominant behavioral modes. This creates a self-reinforcing loop-repeatedly sampling and rewarding dominant modes-that further erodes exploration. We introduce Exploration-Enhanced Policy Optimization (EEPO), a framework that promotes exploration via two-stage rollouts with adaptive unlearning. In the first stage, the model generates half of the trajectories; it then undergoes a lightweight unlearning step to temporarily suppress these sampled responses, forcing the second stage to explore different regions of the output space. This sample-then-forget mechanism disrupts the self-reinforcing loop and promotes wider exploration during rollouts. Across five reasoning benchmarks, EEPO outperforms GRPO, achieving average relative gains of 24.3% on Qwen2.5-3B, 33.0% on Llama3.2-3B-Instruct, and 10.4% on Qwen3-8B-Base.

Problem

• Balancing exploration and exploitation in RLVR for LLMs
• Addressing entropy collapse and limited exploratory capacity
• Disrupting self-reinforcing loops of dominant behavioral modes

Innovation

• Two-stage rollouts with adaptive unlearning
• Sample-then-forget mechanism disrupts reinforcement loop
• Lightweight unlearning suppresses sampled responses temporarily