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Process rewards have been widely used in deep reinforcement learning to improve training efficiency, reduce variance, and prevent reward hacking. In LLM reasoning, existing works also explore various solutions for learning effective process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Xian Wu , Kaijie Zhu , Ying Zhang , Lun Wang , Wenbo Guo

Reward models (RMs) are fundamental to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) via human feedback, yet they often suffer from reward hacking. They tend to latch on to superficial or spurious attributes, such as response length or formatting,…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in training large language models (LLMs) for preventing unexpected outputs, eg reducing harmfulness and errors. However, existing RL methods mostly adopt the instance-level reward, which is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Zhipeng Chen , Kun Zhou , Wayne Xin Zhao , Junchen Wan , Fuzheng Zhang , Di Zhang , Ji-Rong Wen

Code generation is a core application of large language models (LLMs), yet LLMs still frequently fail on complex programming tasks. Given its success in mathematical reasoning, test-time scaling approaches such as Process Reward Model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Ruiyi Zhang , Peijia Qin , Qi Cao , Eric Xue , Pengtao Xie

Effective prompt engineering remains a central challenge in fully harnessing the capabilities of LLMs. While well-designed prompts can dramatically enhance performance, crafting them typically demands expert intuition and a nuanced…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Paweł Batorski , Adrian Kosmala , Paul Swoboda

Recent studies show that Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong reasoning capabilities through supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning. However, a key approach, the Process Reward Model (PRM), suffers from reward hacking,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Teng Wang , Zhangyi Jiang , Zhenqi He , Shenyang Tong , Wenhan Yang , Yanan Zheng , Zeyu Li , Zifan He , Hailei Gong , Zewen Ye , Shengjie Ma , Jianping Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on external tools such as search engines to solve complex agentic tasks that require reasoning and external knowledge retrieval. Recently, reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Peiran Xu , Zhuohao Li , Xiaoying Xing , Guannan Zhang , Debiao Li , Kunyu Shi

Reasoning in large language models has long been a central research focus, and recent studies employing reinforcement learning (RL) have introduced diverse methods that yield substantial performance gains with minimal or even no external…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate transformative potential, yet their reasoning remains inconsistent and unreliable. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning is a key mechanism for improvement, but its effectiveness is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Pei-Chi Pan , Yingbin Liang , Sen Lin

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Meng Cao , Lei Shu , Lei Yu , Yun Zhu , Nevan Wichers , Yinxiao Liu , Lei Meng

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

Process reward models (PRMs) allow for fine-grained credit assignment in reinforcement learning (RL), and seemingly contrast with outcome reward models (ORMs), which assign a single reward to an entire trajectory. However, we provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Michael Sullivan , Alexander Koller

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

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong math reasoning abilities through Reinforcement Learning with *Verifiable Rewards* (RLVR), many advanced mathematical problems are proof-based, with no guaranteed way to determine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Haotong Yang , Zitong Wang , Shijia Kang , Siqi Yang , Wenkai Yu , Xu Niu , Yike Sun , Yi Hu , Zhouchen Lin , Muhan Zhang

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

Process Reward Models (PRMs) supervise intermediate reasoning steps in large language models (LLMs), but existing PRMs are mainly trained on general-domain data and struggle with the structured, symbolic, and fact-sensitive nature of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jie Zhu , Yuanchen Zhou , Shuo Jiang , Junhui Li , Lifan Guo , Feng Chen , Chi Zhang

Document summarisation can be formulated as a sequential decision-making problem, which can be solved by Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. The predominant RL paradigm for summarisation learns a cross-input policy, which requires…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-07-31 Yang Gao , Christian M. Meyer , Mohsen Mesgar , Iryna Gurevych

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a promising paradigm for optimizing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in complex reasoning tasks. However, traditional outcome-based RL approaches often suffer from reward sparsity and inefficient…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Zhao Wang , Ziliang Zhao , Zhicheng Dou

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved performance on the Text-to-SQL task by leveraging their powerful reasoning capabilities. To enhance accuracy during the reasoning process, external Process Reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Yuxin Zhang , Meihao Fan , Ju Fan , Mingyang Yi , Yuyu Luo , Jian Tan , Guoliang Li

Step-by-step verifiers -- also known as process reward models (PRMs) -- are a key ingredient for test-time scaling. PRMs require step-level supervision, making them expensive to train. This work aims to build data-efficient PRMs as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Muhammad Khalifa , Rishabh Agarwal , Lajanugen Logeswaran , Jaekyeom Kim , Hao Peng , Moontae Lee , Honglak Lee , Lu Wang