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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

Adapting large language models (LLMs) via reinforcement learning (RL) is often bottlenecked by the generation stage, which can consume over 75\% of the training time. Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates autoregressive generation in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Qiaoling Chen , Zijun Liu , Peng Sun , Shenggui Li , Guoteng Wang , Ziming Liu , Yonggang Wen , Siyuan Feng , Tianwei Zhang

Designing reward functions for continuous-control robotics often leads to subtle misalignments or reward hacking, especially in complex tasks. Preference-based RL mitigates some of these pitfalls by learning rewards from comparative…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Anukriti Singh , Amisha Bhaskar , Peihong Yu , Souradip Chakraborty , Ruthwik Dasyam , Amrit Bedi , Pratap Tokekar

Rewards serve as a measure of user satisfaction and act as a limiting factor in interactive recommender systems. In this research, we focus on the problem of learning to reward (LTR), which is fundamental to reinforcement learning. Previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Jialin Liu , Xinyan Su , Zeyu He , Xiangyu Zhao , Jun Li

Language models must be adapted to understand and follow user instructions. Reinforcement learning is widely used to facilitate this -- typically using fixed criteria such as "helpfulness" and "harmfulness". In our work, we instead propose…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Vijay Viswanathan , Yanchao Sun , Shuang Ma , Xiang Kong , Meng Cao , Graham Neubig , Tongshuang Wu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve remarkable reasoning in domains like mathematics and coding, where verifiable rewards provide clear signals. However, extending this paradigm to financial…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Rui Sun , Yifan Sun , Sheng Xu , Li Zhao , Jing Li , Daxin Jiang , Cheng Hua , Zuo Bai

Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the careful design of the reward function. However, accurately assigning rewards to each state-action pair in Long-Term Reinforcement Learning (LTRL) tasks remains a significant challenge. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Qi Ju , Falin Hei , Zhemei Fang , Yunfeng Luo

Reinforcement learning (RL), a common tool in decision making, learns control policies from various experiences based on the associated cumulative return/rewards without treating them differently. Humans, on the contrary, often learn to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) elicits long chain-of-thought reasoning in large language models (LLMs), but outcome-based rewards lead to coarse-grained advantage estimation. While existing approaches improve RLVR via…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Fei Wu , Zhenrong Zhang , Qikai Chang , Jianshu Zhang , Quan Liu , Jun Du

Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods for training large language models (LLMs) require ground-truth labels or task-specific verifiers, limiting scalability when correctness is ambiguous or expensive to obtain. We introduce Reinforcement…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Micah Rentschler , Jesse Roberts

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong reasoning performance by generating long chains of thought (CoTs), yet only a small fraction of these traces meaningfully contributes to answer prediction, while the majority contains repetitive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Siyuan Wang , Yanchen Liu , Xiang Ren

Training large language models with reinforcement learning (RL) against verifiable rewards significantly enhances their reasoning abilities, yet remains computationally expensive due to inefficient uniform prompt sampling. We introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Ruiqi Zhang , Daman Arora , Song Mei , Andrea Zanette

Large language models show strong potential for automated code generation, but lack guarantees for correctness, quality, safety, and domain-specific constraints. For instance in robotics, where code generation is increasingly being used for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Erfan Aghadavoodi Jolfaei , Daniel Maninger , Abhinav Anand , Mert Tiftikci , Mira Mezini

This paper investigates Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in long-horizon, multi-turn scenarios. Although RL algorithms such as Group Relative Policy…

Teaching agents to follow complex written instructions has been an important yet elusive goal. One technique for enhancing learning efficiency is language reward shaping (LRS). Within a reinforcement learning (RL) framework, LRS involves…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Sukai Huang , Nir Lipovetzky , Trevor Cohn

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by using rule-based binary feedback. However, current RLVR methods typically assign the same reward to every token.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Guofu Xie , Yunsheng Shi , Hongtao Tian , Ting Yao , Xiao Zhang

Ensuring that reinforcement learning (RL) controllers satisfy safety and reliability constraints in real-world settings remains challenging: state-avoidance and constrained Markov decision processes often fail to capture trajectory-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Alper Kamil Bozkurt , Calin Belta , Ming C. Lin

Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Dhawal Gupta , Yash Chandak , Scott M. Jordan , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in solving complex problems through reinforcement learning (RL), particularly by generating long reasoning traces. However, these extended outputs often exhibit substantial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Wei Liu , Ruochen Zhou , Yiyun Deng , Yuzhen Huang , Junteng Liu , Yuntian Deng , Yizhe Zhang , Junxian He

Agentic reinforcement learning (Agentic RL) has achieved strong progress in tasks with clear success signals. However, many real-world agent applications require user-conditioned behavior: the same query may call for different planning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Ranxu zhang , zeyang li , Jiacheng Huang , Rui Zhang , Xiaozhou Xu , sun zhe , Yanyong Zhang , Chao Wang