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Reward-based alignment methods for large language models (LLMs) face two key limitations: vulnerability to reward hacking, where models exploit flaws in the reward signal; and reliance on brittle, labor-intensive prompt engineering when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Zae Myung Kim , Chanwoo Park , Vipul Raheja , Suin Kim , Dongyeop Kang

Mathematical reasoning is a key benchmark for large language models. Reinforcement learning is a standard post-training mechanism for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models, yet performance remains sensitive to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Arash Ahmadi , Sarah Sharif , Yaser , Banad

Direct alignment methods are increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, many real-world alignment problems involve multiple conflicting objectives, where naive aggregation of preferences can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Peter Chen , Xiaopeng Li , Xi Chen , Tianyi Lin

The optimal objective is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how policies are evaluated and optimized. While total return maximization is the ideal objective in RL, discounted return maximization is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Shuyu Yin , Fei Wen , Peilin Liu , Tao Luo

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach for training agents to perform tasks, but designing an appropriate reward mechanism is critical to its success. However, in many cases, the complexity of the learning objectives goes beyond…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-16 Ernst Moritz Hahn , Mateo Perez , Sven Schewe , Fabio Somenzi , Ashutosh Trivedi , Dominik Wojtczak

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) enhances Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning but suffers from advantage collapse on ``hard samples'' where all rollouts fail. This lack of variance eliminates crucial learning signals.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Xinyu Lu , Kaiqi Zhang , Jinglin Yang , Boxi Cao , Yaojie Lu , Hongyu Lin , Min He , Xianpei Han , Le Sun

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Reward Models (RMs) are crucial for online alignment of language models (LMs) with human preferences. However, RM-based preference-tuning is vulnerable to reward hacking, whereby LM policies learn undesirable behaviors from flawed RMs. By…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Daniel Fein , Max Lamparth , Violet Xiang , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Nick Haber

Recent advancements in post-training methodologies for large language models (LLMs) have highlighted reinforcement learning (RL) as a critical component for enhancing reasoning. However, the substantial computational costs associated with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Songjun Tu , Jiahao Lin , Xiangyu Tian , Qichao Zhang , Linjing Li , Yuqian Fu , Nan Xu , Wei He , Xiangyuan Lan , Dongmei Jiang , Dongbin Zhao

A safe and trustworthy use of Large Language Models (LLMs) requires an accurate expression of confidence in their answers. We propose a novel Reinforcement Learning approach that allows to directly fine-tune LLMs to express calibrated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 David Bani-Harouni , Chantal Pellegrini , Paul Stangel , Ege Özsoy , Kamilia Zaripova , Nassir Navab , Matthias Keicher

Process Reward Models (PRMs), which assign fine-grained scores to intermediate reasoning steps within a solution trajectory, have emerged as a promising approach to enhance the reasoning quality of Large Language Models (LLMs). However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Lingyin Zhang , Jun Gao , Xiaoxue Ren , Ziqiang Cao

The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-25 Wuxia Chen , Taposh Banerjee , Jemin George , Carl Busart

Techniques that learn improved representations via offline data or self-supervised objectives have shown impressive results in traditional reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, it is unclear how improved representation learning can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Vaskar Nath , Dylan Slack , Jeff Da , Yuntao Ma , Hugh Zhang , Spencer Whitehead , Sean Hendryx

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective approach for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). The Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) family has demonstrated strong…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Chenxi Liu , Junjie Liang , Yuqi Jia , Bochuan Cao , Yang Bai , Heng Huang , Xun Chen

Though significant advancements have been achieved in developing long-context large language models (LLMs), the compromised quality of LLM-synthesized data for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often affects the long-context performance of SFT…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Jiajie Zhang , Zhongni Hou , Xin Lv , Shulin Cao , Zhenyu Hou , Yilin Niu , Lei Hou , Yuxiao Dong , Ling Feng , Juanzi Li

Alignment is vital for safely deploying large language models (LLMs). Existing techniques are either reward-based (training a reward model on preference pairs and optimizing with reinforcement learning) or reward-free (directly fine-tuning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ruoxi Cheng , Haoxuan Ma , Weixin Wang , Ranjie Duan , Jiexi Liu , Xiaoshuang Jia , Simeng Qin , Xiaochun Cao , Yang Liu , Xiaojun Jia

We deploy large language models (LLMs) as business development (BD) agents for persuasive price negotiation in online travel agencies (OTAs). The agent must follow a multi-stage Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and strict guardrails (no…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Xia Zeng , Yihan Chen , Luhui Liu , Chao Luo , Ye Chen , Zhuoran Zhuang

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) already achieve state-of-the-art results across a wide range of tasks and modalities. To push their reasoning ability further, recent studies explore advanced prompting schemes and post-training…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Zhenyu Pan , Yutong Zhang , Jianshu Zhang , Haoran Lu , Haozheng Luo , Yuwei Han , Philip S. Yu , Manling Li , Han Liu

As language models become increasingly capable, users expect them to provide not only accurate responses but also behaviors aligned with diverse human preferences across a variety of scenarios. To achieve this, Reinforcement learning (RL)…

Reward models (RMs) are a crucial component in the alignment of large language models' (LLMs) outputs with human values. RMs approximate human preferences over possible LLM responses to the same prompt by predicting and comparing reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Junqi Jiang , Tom Bewley , Saumitra Mishra , Freddy Lecue , Manuela Veloso