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Comment by theOGognf

4 days ago

I feel like both this comment and the parent comment highlight how RL has been going through a cycle of misunderstanding recently from another one of its popularity booms due to being used to train LLMs

care to correct the misunderstanding?

  • I mean DPO, PPO, and GRPO all use losses that are not what’s used with SFT for one.

    They also force exploration as a part of the algorithm.

    They can be used for synthetic data generation once the reward model is good enough.

Its reductive, but also roughly correct.

  • While collecting data according to policy is part of RL, 'reductive' is an understatement. It's like saying algebra is all about scalar products. Well yes, 1%