policy

Definition

In reinforcement learning, the function mapping a state to a distribution over actions — the thing being learned. Policy-gradient methods update it directly; value-based methods derive it from an estimated return. When an LLM is tuned with RL, the model itself is the policy and tokens are its actions. Unrelated to the everyday sense of a rule or guideline.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Explained: Beyond Teacher Assignment — Why Choosing the Right Teacher Isn't Enough When You Distill Many Specialists into One ModelBeyond Teacher Assignment: Domain-Normalized Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation
• Paper Explained: RewardVerse — A Video Reward Model That Writes the Rubric Before It Scores (RGPO)RewardVerse: Rubric-Guided Policy Optimization for Video Reward Modeling
• Paper Explained: Bellman Policy Optimization — Policy Mirror Descent for LLMs, Without a Value ModelBellman Policy Optimization