Benefits and Pitfalls of Reinforcement Learning for Language Model
  Planning: A Theoretical Perspective
Authors: name: Siwei Wang; name: Yifei Shen; name: Haoran Sun; name: Shi Feng; name: Shang-Hua Teng; name: Li Dong; name: Yaru Hao; name: Wei Chen
Published: 2025-09-26 17:39:48

Abstract: Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have substantially enhanced the
planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the theoretical
basis for their effectiveness remains elusive. In this work, we investigate
RL's benefits and limitations through a tractable graph-based abstraction,
focusing on policy gradient (PG) and Q-learning methods. Our theoretical
analyses reveal that supervised fine-tuning (SFT) may introduce
co-occurrence-based spurious solutions, whereas RL achieves correct planning
primarily through exploration, underscoring exploration's role in enabling
better generalization. However, we also show that PG suffers from diversity
collapse, where output diversity decreases during training and persists even
after perfect accuracy is attained. By contrast, Q-learning provides two key
advantages: off-policy learning and diversity preservation at convergence. We
further demonstrate that careful reward design is necessary to prevent reward
hacking in Q-learning. Finally, applying our framework to the real-world
planning benchmark Blocksworld, we confirm that these behaviors manifest in
practice.