Yiju Guo
2026
Less Noise, More Voice: Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning via Instruction Purification
Yiju Guo | Tianyi Hu | Zexu Sun | Yankai Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yiju Guo | Tianyi Hu | Zexu Sun | Yankai Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has advanced LLM reasoning, but remains constrained by inefficient exploration under limited rollout budgets, leading to low sampling success and unstable training in complex tasks. We find that many exploration failures arise not from problem difficulty, but from a small number of prompt tokens that introduce interference. Building on this insight, we propose the Less Noise Sampling Framework (LENS), which first purifies prompts by identifying and removing interference tokens. then transfers successful rollouts from the purified setting to supervise policy optimization on the original noisy prompts, enabling the model to learn to ignore interference in the real-world, noisy prompting settings. Experimental results show that LENS significantly outperforms GRPO, delivering higher performance and faster convergence, with a 3.88% average gain and over 1.6 × speedup. Our work highlights the critical role of pruning interference tokens in improving rollout efficiency, offering a new perspective for RLVR research.
2024
Controllable Preference Optimization: Toward Controllable Multi-Objective Alignment
Yiju Guo | Ganqu Cui | Lifan Yuan | Ning Ding | Zexu Sun | Bowen Sun | Huimin Chen | Ruobing Xie | Jie Zhou | Yankai Lin | Zhiyuan Liu | Maosong Sun
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yiju Guo | Ganqu Cui | Lifan Yuan | Ning Ding | Zexu Sun | Bowen Sun | Huimin Chen | Ruobing Xie | Jie Zhou | Yankai Lin | Zhiyuan Liu | Maosong Sun
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Alignment in artificial intelligence pursues the consistency between model responses and human preferences as well as values. In practice, the multifaceted nature of human preferences inadvertently introduces what is known as the ”alignment tax”–a compromise where enhancements in alignment within one objective (e.g., harmlessness) can diminish performance in others (e.g., helpfulness). However, existing alignment techniques are mostly unidirectional, leading to suboptimal trade-offs and poor flexibility over various objectives. To navigate this challenge, we argue the prominence of grounding LLMs with evident preferences. We introduce controllable preference optimization (CPO), which explicitly specifies preference scores for different objectives, thereby guiding the model to generate responses that meet the requirements. Our experimental analysis reveals that the aligned models can provide responses that match various preferences among the ”3H” (helpfulness, honesty, harmlessness) desiderata. Furthermore, by introducing diverse data and alignment goals, we surpass baseline methods in aligning with single objectives, hence mitigating the impact of the alignment tax and achieving improvements in multi-objective alignment.