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Related papers: Reasoning without Regret

200 papers

Reinforcement learning is critical to improving large reasoning models, but its success relies heavily on verifiable rewards (RLVR), making it hard to use in open-ended domains where correctness is ambiguous and cannot be verified.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yifan Wang , Bolian Li , David Cho , Ruqi Zhang , Fanping Sui , Ananth Grama

Recent reasoning-focused language models such as DeepSeek R1 and OpenAI o1 have demonstrated strong performance on structured reasoning benchmarks including GSM8K, MATH, and multi-hop question answering tasks. However, their performance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Rahul Soni

Recent alignment techniques, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, have been widely adopted to align large language models with human preferences by learning and leveraging reward models. In practice, these models often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Ignavier Ng , Patrick Blöbaum , Siddharth Bhandari , Kun Zhang , Shiva Kasiviswanathan

The aim of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is to create systems capable of making autonomous decisions by learning from their environment through trial and error. This paper emphasizes the importance of reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Sinan Ibrahim , Mostafa Mostafa , Ali Jnadi , Hadi Salloum , Pavel Osinenko

How should future neural reasoning systems implement extended computation? Recursive Reasoning Models (RRMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive sequence extension by performing iterative latent-state refinement with shared…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Junyeob Baek , Mingyu Jo , Minsu Kim , Mengye Ren , Yoshua Bengio , Sungjin Ahn

Reward design in reinforcement learning and optimal control is challenging. Preference-based alignment addresses this by enabling agents to learn rewards from ranked trajectory pairs provided by humans. However, existing methods often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Zhixian Xie , Haode Zhang , Yizhe Feng , Wanxin Jin

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves final-answer accuracy on reasoning tasks, but it does not reliably improve reasoning quality. Because outcome rewards only assess final answers, they also reward spurious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Chenlu Ye , Zhou Yu , Ziji Zhang , Hao Chen , Narayanan Sadagopan , Jing Huang , Tong Zhang , Anurag Beniwal

Reasoning models enhance performance by tackling problems in a step-by-step manner, decomposing them into sub-problems and exploring long chains of thought before producing an answer. However, applying extended reasoning to every step…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Haiquan Lu , Gongfan Fang , Xinyin Ma , Qi Li , Xinchao Wang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves large language model performance on complex tasks, but often produces excessively long and inefficient reasoning traces. Existing methods shorten CoTs using length penalties or global entropy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Xuan Xiong , Huan Liu , Li Gu , Zhixiang Chi , Yue Qiu , Yuanhao Yu , Yang Wang

DEEPTHINK methods improve reasoning by generating, refining, and aggregating populations of candidate solutions, which enables strong performance on complex mathematical and scientific tasks. However, existing frameworks often lack reliable…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Rituraj Sharma , Weiyuan Chen , Noah Provenzano , Tu Vu

While reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has advanced LLM reasoning in structured domains like mathematics and programming, its application to general-domain reasoning tasks remains challenging due to the absence of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Wenlin Zhong , Chengyuan Liu , Yiquan Wu , Bovin Tan , Changlong Sun , Yi Wang , Xiaozhong Liu , Kun Kuang

Motivated by applications to online advertising and recommender systems, we consider a game-theoretic model with delayed rewards and asynchronous, payoff-based feedback. In contrast to previous work on delayed multi-armed bandits, we focus…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Amélie Héliou , Panayotis Mertikopoulos , Zhengyuan Zhou

We introduce Self-supervised Online Reward Shaping (SORS), which aims to improve the sample efficiency of any RL algorithm in sparse-reward environments by automatically densifying rewards. The proposed framework alternates between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Farzan Memarian , Wonjoon Goo , Rudolf Lioutikov , Scott Niekum , Ufuk Topcu

Recent work has shown that asking language models to generate reasoning steps improves performance on many reasoning tasks. When moving beyond prompting, this raises the question of how we should supervise such models: outcome-based…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) exhibit unprecedented capabilities in solving complex problems through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, recent studies reveal that their final answers often contradict their own reasoning traces. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yuhui Wang , Changjiang Li , Guangke Chen , Jiacheng Liang , Ting Wang

Evaluating instruction-guided image edits requires rewards that reflect subtle human preferences, yet current reward models typically depend on large-scale preference annotation and additional model training. This creates a data-efficiency…

Reasoning is a key component of language understanding in Large Language Models. While Chain-of-Thought prompting enhances performance via explicit intermediate steps, it suffers from sufficient token overhead and a fixed reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Xinyuan Wang , Dongjie Wang , Wangyang Ying , Haoyue Bai , Nanxu Gong , Sixun Dong , Kunpeng Liu , Yanjie Fu

Large reasoning models (LRMs) aim to solve diverse and complex problems through structured reasoning. Recent advances in group-based policy optimization methods have shown promise in enabling stable advantage estimation without reliance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zhizheng Jiang , Kang Zhao , Weikai Xu , Xinkui Lin , Wei Liu , Jian Luan , Shuo Shang , Peng Han

Improving the multi-step reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a critical yet challenging task. The dominant paradigm, outcome-supervised reinforcement learning (RLVR), rewards only correct final answers, often propagating…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Beining Wang , Weihang Su , Hongtao Tian , Tao Yang , Yujia Zhou , Ting Yao , Qingyao Ai , Yiqun Liu

Reward models (RMs), which are central to existing post-training methods, aim to align LLM outputs with human values by providing feedback signals during fine-tuning. However, existing RMs struggle to capture nuanced, user-specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Mengdi Li , Guanqiao Chen , Xufeng Zhao , Haochen Wen , Shu Yang , Di Wang