PPO-HSC: An Exploratory Reinforcement Learning Framework Based on Wide-Area Policy Coverage Optimization

Abstract

This paper introduces PPO-HSC (Proximal Policy Optimization with High-order Sampling Coverage), an exploratory reinforcement learning framework designed to address the "Invisible Shackles" of mode collapse in Large Language Model (LLM) fine-tuning. While standard Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) effectively reinforces high-reward trajectories, it often leads models to over-optimize known solutions, sacrificing curiosity and the ability to explore broader solution manifolds. To overcome this, PPO-HSC incorporates a High-order Sampling Coverage (HSC) reward that incentivizes the discovery of "low-similarity yet high-validity" reasoning patterns. By maintaining a dynamic trajectory library of verified unique solutions, the framework provides a differentiable signal that rewards semantic novelty while ensuring structural rationality through a plausibility constraint. Empirical evaluations on mathematical reasoning (GSM8K, SVAMP) and code generation tasks demonstrate that PPO-HSC significantly enhances solution diversity and state-space coverage while maintaining or surpassing the accuracy and syntax integrity of state-of-the-art RL baselines.