Backpropagating Verifier Rewards Through Continuous Flow Language Models
cs.LG
Submitted: 2026-10-13
Updated: 2026-10-13
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially improved the reasoning of autoregressive and discrete-diffusion language models.
Terminology
Abstract
Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially improved the reasoning of autoregressive and discrete-diffusion language models. Language models that generate continuous token embeddings are emerging as a strong alternative, but RL post-training for them remains understudied. We propose, a post-training framework for continuous flow language models. Such a model denoises token embeddings over multiple steps and decodes them into discrete tokens only at the last step. To obtain pathwise gradients, which backpropagate through continuous actions and have much lower variance than REINFORCE, we introduce a critic that estimates the value of intermediate token embeddings, bypassing the non-differentiable decoding step. The critic must also keep track of the value function as the policy changes; to this end, we design a critic that predicts a value from every token representation and improves policy optimization. Across four reasoning tasks, reliably improves a continuous flow language model through RL post-training and outperforms baseline methods of the same type.
Sources
- Stochastic Interpolants: A Unifying Framework for Flows and Diffusions
- Thinking Fast and Slow with Deep Learning and Tree Search
- Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning
- Analog Bits: Generating Discrete Data using Diffusion Models with Self-Conditioning
- DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
- Continuous diffusion for categorical data
- DPOK: Reinforcement Learning for Fine-tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
- Stream of Search (SoS): Learning to Search in Language
- DiffuSeq: Sequence to Sequence Text Generation with Diffusion Models
- Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor
- ELF: Embedded Language Flows
- Large Language Models Can Self-Improve
- MixGRPO: Unlocking Flow-based GRPO Efficiency with Mixed ODE-SDE
- Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation
- Continuous control with deep reinforcement learning
- Flow Matching for Generative Modeling
- Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RL
- Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow
- Discrete Diffusion Modeling by Estimating the Ratios of the Data Distribution
- Flow Matching Policy Gradients
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