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Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of being in-context learners. However, the underlying mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) is still a major research question, and experimental research results about how models exploit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Aliakbar Nafar , Kristen Brent Venable , Parisa Kordjamshidi

Large language models can generate solutions to complex problems, but training them with reinforcement learning typically requires verifiable rewards that are expensive to create and not possible for all domains. We demonstrate that LLMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Toby Simonds , Kevin Lopez , Akira Yoshiyama , Dominique Garmier

In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) is an emerging RL paradigm where an agent, after pretraining, can adapt to out-of-distribution test tasks without any parameter updates, instead relying on an expanding context of interaction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Amir Moeini , Minjae Kwon , Alper Kamil Bozkurt , Yuichi Motai , Rohan Chandra , Lu Feng , Shangtong Zhang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) aligns Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, yet the underlying reward signals they internalize remain hidden, posing a critical challenge for interpretability and safety.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Nyal Patel , Matthieu Bou , Arjun Jagota , Satyapriya Krishna , Sonali Parbhoo

Reinforcement learning (RL) for mathematical reasoning can suffer from reward sparsity: for challenging problems, LLM fails to sample any correct trajectories, preventing RL from receiving meaningful positive feedback. At the same time,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Yangzhen Wu , Shanda Li , Zixin Wen , Xin Zhou , Ameet Talwalkar , Yiming Yang , Wenhao Huang , Tianle Cai

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a viable recipe for training LLM agents to reason over external memory banks in multi-session dialogue. Existing work trains exclusively on a single benchmark, leaving open how the composition of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Xinjie He , Zhiyuan Lin , Su Liu , Jialun Wu , Qiyang Xie , Weikai Zhou , Shuai Xiao

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover the reward function of an expert agent from demonstrations of behavior. It is well-known that the IRL problem is fundamentally ill-posed, i.e., many reward functions can explain the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Filippo Lazzati , Mirco Mutti , Alberto Maria Metelli

Large pretrained models are showing increasingly better performance in reasoning and planning tasks across different modalities, opening the possibility to leverage them for complex sequential decision making problems. In this paper, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Martin Klissarov , Devon Hjelm , Alexander Toshev , Bogdan Mazoure

In-context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful capability alongside the development of scaled-up large language models (LLMs). By instructing LLMs using few-shot demonstrative examples, ICL enables them to perform a wide range of tasks…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Quanyu Long , Yin Wu , Wenya Wang , Sinno Jialin Pan

In adversarial environments, one side could gain an advantage by identifying the opponent's strategy. For example, in combat games, if an opponents strategy is identified as overly aggressive, one could lay a trap that exploits the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Mark Rucker , Stephen Adams , Roy Hayes , Peter A. Beling

When language models (LMs) are trained via reinforcement learning (RL) to generate natural language "reasoning chains", their performance improves on a variety of difficult question answering tasks. Today, almost all successful applications…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Mehul Damani , Isha Puri , Stewart Slocum , Idan Shenfeld , Leshem Choshen , Yoon Kim , Jacob Andreas

In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL) is a frontier paradigm to solve Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems in the foundation model era. While ICRL capabilities have been demonstrated in transformers through task-specific training, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Fanzeng Xia , Hao Liu , Yisong Yue , Tongxin Li

Large language models (LLMs) excel at many supervised tasks but often struggle with structured reasoning in unfamiliar settings. This discrepancy suggests that standard fine-tuning pipelines may instill narrow, domain-specific heuristics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Zhen Hao Wong , Jingwen Deng , Runming He , Zirong Chen , Qijie You , Hejun Dong , Hao Liang , Chengyu Shen , Bin Cui , Wentao Zhang

In-context learning (ICL) allows some autoregressive models to solve tasks via next-token prediction and without needing further training. This has led to claims about these model's ability to solve (learn) unseen tasks with only a few…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Adrian de Wynter

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) suffers from exploration inefficiency, where models struggle to generate successful rollouts, resulting in minimal learning signal. This challenge is particularly severe for tasks that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Saaket Agashe , Jayanth Srinivasa , Gaowen Liu , Ramana Kompella , Xin Eric Wang

Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) is a promising approach for pretraining generalist policies on large datasets of reward-free trajectories, akin to the self-supervised objectives used to train foundation models for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-05 John L. Zhou , Jonathan C. Kao

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated significant promise in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Text2SQL LLMs, especially with advanced algorithms such as GRPO and DAPO. However, the performance of these methods is highly…

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to reason during post-training typically relies on reinforcement learning with explicit outcome- or process-based reward functions. However, in many real-world settings, obtaining or defining such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Claudio Fanconi , Nicolás Astorga , Mihaela van der Schaar

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) knowledge with sequential decision-making tasks. However, few studies have thoroughly investigated the impact on LLM agents capabilities of…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to substantially improve the reasoning capability of small and large language models (LLMs), but existing approaches typically rely on verifiable rewards, hence ground truth labels. We propose an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Yiyang Shen , Lifu Tu , Weiran Wang