Addressing Performance Saturation for LLM RL via Precise Entropy Curve Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces Entrocraft, a rejection-sampling method that controls entropy in RL for LLMs, preventing performance saturation and improving generalization and diversity.

Contribution

Entrocraft provides a simple, regularization-free approach to precisely schedule entropy, enabling sustained RL training improvements in large language models.

Findings

Entrocraft outperforms baseline models in generalization and diversity.

Linear entropy annealing yields the best performance.

Model performance is sustained longer before plateauing.

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled complex reasoning abilities in large language models (LLMs). However, most RL algorithms suffer from performance saturation, preventing continued gains as RL training scales. This problem can be characterized by the collapse of entropy, a key diagnostic for exploration in RL. Existing attempts focus on preventing entropy collapse through regularization or clipping. However, their resulting entropy curves often exhibit instability in the long term, which hinders performance gains. In this paper, we introduce Entrocraft, a simple rejection-sampling approach that realizes user-customized entropy schedule by biasing the advantage distributions. Entrocraft requires no objective regularization and is advantage-estimator-agnostic. Theoretically, we relate per-step entropy change to the advantage distribution under minimal assumptions. This explains the behavior of existing RL and entropy-preserving methods. Entrocraft also enables a systematic study of entropy schedules, which reveals that linear annealing, which starts high and decays to a slightly lower target, performs best. Empirically, Entrocraft addresses performance saturation, significantly improving generalization, output diversity, and long-term training. It enables a 4B model to outperform an 8B baseline, sustains improvement for up to 4x longer before plateauing, and raises pass@K by 50% over the baseline.