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Large language models have made significant progress in mathematical reasoning, which serves as an important testbed for AI and could impact scientific research if further advanced. By scaling reasoning with reinforcement learning that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Zhihong Shao , Yuxiang Luo , Chengda Lu , Z. Z. Ren , Jiewen Hu , Tian Ye , Zhibin Gou , Shirong Ma , Xiaokang Zhang

Learning to adapt pretrained language models to unlabeled, out-of-distribution data is a critical challenge, as models often falter on structurally novel reasoning tasks even while excelling within their training distribution. We introduce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Mohammad Mahdi Moradi , Hossam Amer , Sudhir Mudur , Weiwei Zhang , Yang Liu , Walid Ahmed

Large language models (LLMs) excel in tasks like question answering and dialogue, but complex tasks requiring interaction, such as negotiation and persuasion, require additional long-horizon reasoning and planning. Reinforcement learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Joey Hong , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine

Inference-time scaling has proven effective in boosting large language model (LLM) performance through increased test-time computation. Yet, its practical application is often hindered by reliance on external verifiers or a lack of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Fei Wang , Xingchen Wan , Ruoxi Sun , Jiefeng Chen , Sercan Ö. Arık

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become central to training large language models (LLMs), yet the field lacks predictive scaling methodologies comparable to those established for pre-training. Despite rapidly rising compute budgets, there is…

Scaling test time compute has shown remarkable success in improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). In this work, we conduct the first systematic exploration of applying test-time scaling methods to language agents…

Sampling-based search, a simple paradigm for utilizing test-time compute, involves generating multiple candidate responses and selecting the best one -- typically by having models self-verify each response for correctness. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Eric Zhao , Pranjal Awasthi , Sreenivas Gollapudi

With respect to improving the reasoning accuracy of LLMs, the representative reinforcement learning (RL) method GRPO faces failure due to insignificant reward variance, while verification methods based on process reward models (PRMs) suffer…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Sining Zhoubian , Dan Zhang , Jie Tang

Verifiers or reward models are often used to enhance the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs). A common approach is the Best-of-N method, where N candidate solutions generated by the LLM are ranked by a verifier, and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Lunjun Zhang , Arian Hosseini , Hritik Bansal , Mehran Kazemi , Aviral Kumar , Rishabh Agarwal

We investigate the effectiveness of reinforcement learning methods for finetuning large language models when transitioning from offline to semi-online to fully online regimes for both verifiable and non-verifiable tasks. Our experiments…

Test-time scaling aims to improve language model performance by leveraging additional compute during inference. Many works have empirically studied techniques such as Best-of-N (BoN) and Rejection Sampling (RS) that make use of a verifier…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Florian E. Dorner , Yatong Chen , André F. Cruz , Fanny Yang

Recent studies have demonstrated that test-time compute scaling effectively improves the performance of small language models (sLMs). However, prior research has mainly examined test-time compute scaling with an additional larger model as a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Minki Kang , Jongwon Jeong , Jaewoong Cho

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong coding capabilities but still struggle to solve competitive programming problems correctly in a single attempt. Execution-based re-ranking offers a promising test-time scaling strategy,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Zeyao Ma , Jing Zhang , Xiaokang Zhang , Jiaxi Yang , Zongmeng Zhang , Jiajun Zhang , Yuheng Jing , Lei Zhang , Hao Zheng , Wenting Zhao , Junyang Lin , Binyuan Hui

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for post-training language models, but in practice, verifiers are rarely perfect. Recent theoretical work predicts that verifier noise affects the rate of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Ryo Mitsuhashi , Patrick Chen , Isabelle Tseng , Jasin Cekinmez , Addison J. Wu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently improved mathematical reasoning through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR). However, existing RLVR algorithms require large query budgets, making annotation costly. We investigate…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Hao Yi , Yulan Hu , Xin Li , Sheng Ouyang , Lizhong Ding , Yong Liu

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has shown promise in enhancing the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by increasing test-time compute. However, even after extensive RLVR training, such models still…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Pinzheng Wang , Shuli Xu , Juntao Li , Yu Luo , Dong Li , Jianye Hao , Min Zhang

This paper investigates Reinforcement Learning (RL) on data without explicit labels for reasoning tasks in Large Language Models (LLMs). The core challenge of the problem is reward estimation during inference while not having access to…

Test-time scaling (TTS) for large language models (LLMs) has thus far fallen into two largely separate paradigms: (1) reinforcement learning (RL) methods that optimize sparse outcome-based rewards, yet suffer from instability and low sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Can Jin , Yang Zhou , Qixin Zhang , Hongwu Peng , Di Zhang , Zihan Dong , Marco Pavone , Ligong Han , Zhang-Wei Hong , Tong Che , Dimitris N. Metaxas

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a dominant paradigm for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) reasoning, yet its reliance on external verifiers limits its scalability. Recent findings suggest that RLVR…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Xin-Qiang Cai , Masashi Sugiyama

Test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for self-evolving large reasoning models (LRMs), enabling online adaptation on unlabeled test inputs via self-induced rewards through majority voting. However, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ruotong Liao , Nikolai Röhrich , Xiaohan Wang , Yuhui Zhang , Yasaman Samadzadeh , Volker Tresp , Serena Yeung-Levy