Flexible Entropy Control in RLVR with Gradient-Preserving Perspective

Kun Chen, Peng Shi, Fanfan Liu, Haibo Qiu, Zhixiong Zeng, Siqi Yang, Wenji Mao

Flexible Entropy Control in RLVR with Gradient-Preserving Perspective: 3 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #36 of 58 papers on 2026-02-10. Day-by-day upvote history.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a critical method for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, continuous training often leads to policy entropy collapse, characterized by a rapid decay in entropy that results in premature overconfidence, reduced output diversity, and vanishing gradient norms that inhibit learning. Gradient-Preserving Clipping is a primary factor influencing these dynamics, but existing mitigation strategies are largely static and lack a framework connecting clipping mechanisms to precise entropy control. This paper proposes reshaping entropy control in RL from the perspective of Gradient-Preserving Clipping. We first theoretically and empirically verify the contributions of specific importance sampling ratio regions to entropy growth and reduction. Leveraging these findings, we introduce a novel regulation mechanism using dynamic clipping threshold to precisely manage entropy. Furthermore, we design and evaluate dynamic entropy control strategies, including increase-then-decrease, decrease-increase-decrease, and oscillatory decay. Experimental results demonstrate that these strategies effectively mitigate entropy collapse, and achieve superior performance across multiple benchmarks.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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