EntroPIC: Towards Stable Long-Term Training of LLMs via Entropy Stabilization with Proportional-Integral Control
Authors: name: Kai Yang, name: Xin Xu, name: Yangkun Chen, name: Weijie Liu, name: Jiafei Lyu, name: Zichuan Lin, name: Deheng Ye, name: Saiyong Yang
Organization: Tencent

Long-term training of large language models (LLMs) requires maintaining stable exploration to prevent the model from collapsing into sub-optimal behaviors. Entropy is crucial in this context, as it controls exploration and helps avoid premature convergence to sub-optimal solutions. However, existing reinforcement learning methods struggle to maintain an appropriate level of entropy, as the training process involves a mix of positive and negative samples, each affecting entropy in different ways across steps. To address this, we propose Entropy stablilization via Proportional-Integral Control (EntroPIC), a novel method that adaptively adjusts the influence of positive and negative samples by dynamically tuning their loss coefficients. This approach stabilizes entropy throughout training, ensuring efficient exploration and steady progress. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis for both on-policy and off-policy learning settings, demonstrating that EntroPIC is effective at controlling entropy in large-scale LLM training. Experimental results show that our method successfully maintains desired entropy levels, enabling stable and optimal RL training for LLMs.