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Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key post-pretraining step for aligning large language models (LLMs) with complex tasks and human preferences. While it is often assumed that RL fine-tuning requires updating most of a model's parameters, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Andrii Balashov

Large language models (LLMs) acquire extensive prior knowledge through large-scale pretraining and can be further enhanced via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training. A growing body of evidence has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Honglin Zhang , Qianyue Hao , Fengli Xu , Yong Li

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit substantial performance disparities across languages, particularly between high- and low-resource settings. We propose a framework for improving performance in underrepresented languages while preserving…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Daniil Gurgurov , Tanja Baeumel , Josef van Genabith , Simon Ostermann

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning has become a crucial step in post-training language models for advanced mathematical reasoning and coding. Following the success of frontier reasoning models, recent work has demonstrated that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Rosie Zhao , Alexandru Meterez , Sham Kakade , Cengiz Pehlevan , Samy Jelassi , Eran Malach

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training often improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) beyond the training domain, while supervised fine-tuning (SFT) frequently leads to general capabilities forgetting.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Dan Shi , Zhuowen Han , Simon Ostermann , Renren Jin , Josef van Genabith , Deyi Xiong

Recent advances in reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are largely driven by reinforcement learning (RL), yet the underlying parameter dynamics during RL training remain poorly understood. This work identifies two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yuchen Cai , Ding Cao , Xin Xu , Zijun Yao , Yuqing Huang , Zhenyu Tan , Benyi Zhang , Guangzhong Sun , Guiquan Liu , Junfeng Fang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for improving the reasoning capabilities of language models (LMs) in domains such as mathematics and coding. However, most modern RL algorithms were designed to target robotics…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Lianghuan Huang , Shuo Li , Sagnik Anupam , Insup Lee , Osbert Bastani

Instruction-fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) under 14B parameters continue to underperform on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, often trailing smaller models like BERT-base on benchmarks such as GLUE and SuperGLUE.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Bokai Hu , Sai Ashish Somayajula , Xin Pan , Pengtao Xie

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) for domain applications in fields such as materials science and engineering depends on the development of fine-tuning strategies that adapt models for specialized, technical capabilities. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Wei Lu , Rachel K. Luu , Markus J. Buehler

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key technique for enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), with policy-gradient algorithms dominating the post-training stage because of their efficiency and effectiveness.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Chang Tian , Matthew B. Blaschko , Mingzhe Xing , Xiuxing Li , Yinliang Yue , Marie-Francine Moens

Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) typically relies on massive computational resources and extensive datasets, limiting accessibility for resource-constrained settings. Our study investigates the potential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Quy-Anh Dang , Chris Ngo

Modern language models are powerful, but typically static after deployment. A major obstacle to building models that continually learn over time is catastrophic forgetting, where updating on new data erases previously acquired capabilities.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jessy Lin , Luke Zettlemoyer , Gargi Ghosh , Wen-Tau Yih , Aram Markosyan , Vincent-Pierre Berges , Barlas Oğuz

Automated Program Repair (APR) uses various tools and techniques to help developers achieve functional and error-free code faster. In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained popularity as components in APR tool chains because…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Roman Macháček , Anastasiia Grishina , Max Hort , Leon Moonen

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks is an essential stage of modern AI deployment. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as the dominant fine-tuning paradigm, underpinning many state-of-the-art LLMs. In contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Xin Qiu , Yulu Gan , Conor F. Hayes , Qiyao Liang , Yinggan Xu , Roberto Dailey , Elliot Meyerson , Babak Hodjat , Risto Miikkulainen

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Lianghuan Huang , Sagnik Anupam , Insup Lee , Shuo Li , Osbert Bastani

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are known to be overly parameterized and have significant redundancy, indicating a small degree of freedom of the PLMs. Motivated by the observation, in this paper, we study the problem of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-02 Zhong Zhang , Bang Liu , Junming Shao

In this paper, we investigate the use of small datasets in the context of offline reinforcement learning (RL). While many common offline RL benchmarks employ datasets with over a million data points, many offline RL applications rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Samin Yeasar Arnob , Scott Fujimoto , Doina Precup

Recent advancements in reasoning-focused language models such as OpenAI's O1 and DeepSeek-R1 have shown that scaling test-time computation-through chain-of-thought reasoning and iterative exploration-can yield substantial improvements on…

Reinforcement learning has become the standard for improving reasoning in large language models, yet evidence increasingly suggests that RL does not teach new strategies; it redistributes probability mass over solutions the base model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Ömer Faruk Akgül , Rajgopal Kannan , Willie Neiswanger , Viktor Prasanna
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