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Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a transformative approach for aligning and enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs), addressing critical challenges in instruction following, ethical alignment, and reasoning capabilities. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Saksham Sahai Srivastava , Vaneet Aggarwal

While reinforcement learning (RL) demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of language models, the training dynamics of RL in LLMs remain unclear. In this work, we provide an explanation of the RL training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xingwu Chen , Tianle Li , Difan Zou

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Siwei Wang , Yifei Shen , Haoran Sun , Shi Feng , Shang-Hua Teng , Li Dong , Yaru Hao , Wei Chen

Reward learning enables the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to tasks where reward is defined by human judgment, building a model of reward by asking humans questions. Most work on reward learning has used simulated environments,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Daniel M. Ziegler , Nisan Stiennon , Jeffrey Wu , Tom B. Brown , Alec Radford , Dario Amodei , Paul Christiano , Geoffrey Irving

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become the de facto standard for tuning LLMs to solve tasks involving reasoning. However, growing evidence shows that models trained in such way often suffer from a significant loss in diversity. We argue…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Germán Kruszewski , Pierre Erbacher , Jos Rozen , Marc Dymetman

The growing disparity between the exponential scaling of computational resources and the finite growth of high-quality text data now constrains conventional scaling approaches for large language models (LLMs). To address this challenge, we…

Incorporating high-level knowledge is an effective way to expedite reinforcement learning (RL), especially for complex tasks with sparse rewards. We investigate an RL problem where the high-level knowledge is in the form of reward machines,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Zhe Xu , Ivan Gavran , Yousef Ahmad , Rupak Majumdar , Daniel Neider , Ufuk Topcu , Bo Wu

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard approach for improving reasoning in language models, yet models trained with RLVR often suffer from diversity collapse: while single-sample accuracy improves,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Marc Dymetman

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a key paradigm for aligning and optimizing large language models (LLMs). Standard approaches treat the LLM as the policy and apply RL directly over the full vocabulary space. However, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Jing-Cheng Pang , Liang Lu , Xian Tang , Kun Jiang , Sijie Wu , Kai Zhang , Xubin Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful post-training technique to incentivize the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). However, LLMs can respond very inconsistently to RL finetuning: some show substantial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Zhepeng Cen , Yihang Yao , William Han , Zuxin Liu , Ding Zhao

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) have exhibited strong reasoning capabilities and emergent reflective behaviors, such as rethinking and error correction, as a form of in-context exploration. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Shenao Zhang , Yaqing Wang , Yinxiao Liu , Tianqi Liu , Peter Grabowski , Eugene Ie , Zhaoran Wang , Yunxuan Li

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit probabilistic output characteristics, yet conventional evaluation frameworks rely on deterministic scalar metrics. This study introduces a Bayesian approach for LLM capability assessment that integrates…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Xiao Xiao , Yu Su , Sijing Zhang , Zhang Chen , Yadong Chen , Tian Liu

Bayesian Reinforcement Learning (BRL), a subclass of Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL), provides a principled framework for generalisation by explicitly incorporating Bayesian task parameters into transition and reward models. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Jingyang You , Hanna Kurniawati

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for generating helpful and harmless content. Existing approaches leverage preference-based human feedback data to learn the reward function and align the LLM with the feedback data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-15 Yuang Cai , Yuyu Yuan , Jinsheng Shi , Qinhong Lin

Language model (LM) alignment improves model outputs to reflect human preferences while preserving the capabilities of the base model. The most common alignment approaches are (i) reinforcement learning, which maximizes the expected reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Lucas Monteiro Paes , Natalie Mackraz , Barry-John Theobald , Federico Danieli

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a key method for improving Large Language Models' reasoning capabilities, yet recent evidence suggests it may paradoxically shrink the reasoning boundary rather than…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Phuc Minh Nguyen , Chinh D. La , Duy M. H. Nguyen , Nitesh V. Chawla , Binh T. Nguyen , Khoa D. Doan

In this work, we present a simple yet theoretically motivated improvement to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for the Large Language Model (LLM), addressing its limited generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). Through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yongliang Wu , Yizhou Zhou , Zhou Ziheng , Yingzhe Peng , Xinyu Ye , Xinting Hu , Wenbo Zhu , Lu Qi , Ming-Hsuan Yang , Xu Yang

Reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning transforms large language models while creating a vulnerability we experimentally verify: Our experiment shows that malicious RL fine-tuning dismantles safety guardrails with remarkable efficiency,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-08 Wenjun Cao

Standard regression techniques, while powerful, are often constrained by predefined, differentiable loss functions such as mean squared error. These functions may not fully capture the desired behavior of a system, especially when dealing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Yongchao Huang

Learning to rank (LTR) plays a crucial role in various Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. Although supervised LTR methods based on fine-grained relevance labels (e.g., document-level annotations) have achieved significant success, their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Yiteng Tu , Zhichao Xu , Tao Yang , Weihang Su , Yujia Zhou , Yiqun Liu , Fen Lin , Qin Liu , Qingyao Ai