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Self-supervised reinforcement learning (RL) presents a promising approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) without reliance on expensive human-annotated data. However, we find that existing methods…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Bizhe Bai , Hongming Wu , Peng Ye , Tao Chen

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have recently shown promise in solving complex math problems when optimized with Reinforcement Learning (RL). But conventional approaches rely on outcome-only rewards that provide sparse feedback, resulting in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Tao He , Rongchuan Mu , Lizi Liao , Yixin Cao , Ming Liu , Bing Qin

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have effectively improved their reasoning abilities, particularly on mathematical and logical problems that have verifiable answers, through techniques such as supervised finetuning (SFT)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Hongyi James Cai , Junlin Wang , Xiaoyin Chen , Bhuwan Dhingra

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in reasoning, alignment, and task-specific performance. However, ensuring harmlessness in these systems remains a critical challenge, particularly in advanced models like…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Manojkumar Parmar , Yuvaraj Govindarajulu

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is commonly used in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback to align large language models (LLMs) with downstream tasks. This paper investigates the feasibility of using PPO for direct reinforcement…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Alexander G. Padula , Dennis J. N. J. Soemers

Post-training has become central to turning pretrained large language models (LLMs) into aligned, capable, and deployable systems. Recent progress spans supervised fine-tuning (SFT), preference optimization, reinforcement learning (RL),…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Shiwan Zhao , Zhihu Wang , Xuyang Zhao , Jiaming Zhou , Caiyue Xu , Chenfei Liu , Liting Zhang , Yuhang Jia , Yanzhe Zhang , Hualong Yu , Zichen Xu , Qicheng Li , Yong Qin

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is highly effective for post-training autoregressive (AR) language models, yet its direct application to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) often triggers reward collapse. We identify two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Jianyuan Zhong , Kaibo Wang , Ding Ding , Zijin Feng , Haoli Bai , Yang Xiang , Jiacheng Sun , Qiang Xu

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 proven remarkably effective at improving the accuracy of language models in verifiable and deterministic domains like mathematics. Here, we examine if current RL methods are also effective at optimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Michael Bereket , Jure Leskovec

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

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs), achieving state-of-the-art performance on tasks with structured, verifiable answers. Applying…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Yiqing Liang , Jielin Qiu , Wenhao Ding , Zuxin Liu , James Tompkin , Mengdi Xu , Mengzhou Xia , Zhengzhong Tu , Laixi Shi , Jiacheng Zhu

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 become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Penghui Qi , Xiangxin Zhou , Zichen Liu , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Min Lin , Wee Sun Lee

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to elicit reliable chain-of-thought reasoning. However, the training process remains bottlenecked by the computationally expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Bingshuai Liu , Ante Wang , Zijun Min , Liang Yao , Haibo Zhang , Yang Liu , Xu Han , Peng Li , Anxiang Zeng , Jinsong Su

In this work, we aim to incentivize the reasoning ability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) via reinforcement learning (RL) and develop an effective approach that mitigates the sparse reward and advantage vanishing issues during…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Huanjin Yao , Qixiang Yin , Jingyi Zhang , Min Yang , Yibo Wang , Wenhao Wu , Fei Su , Li Shen , Minghui Qiu , Dacheng Tao , Jiaxing Huang

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have played an important role in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) systems. While reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly enhanced LLM performance in text-based…

Sound · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Changfeng Gao , Yabin Li , Keyu An , Zhifu Gao , Zhihao Du , Han Zhao , Xiangang Li

Existing Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown the potential of reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the complex reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models~(LLMs). While they achieve remarkable performance on challenging tasks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Huatong Song , Jinhao Jiang , Yingqian Min , Jie Chen , Zhipeng Chen , Wayne Xin Zhao , Lei Fang , Ji-Rong Wen

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR), especially with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has shown strong potential for improving the reasoning capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs). However, in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Bingqing Jiang , Difan Zou

DeepSeek-R1-Zero has shown that reinforcement learning (RL) at scale can directly enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs without supervised fine-tuning. In this work, we critically examine R1-Zero-like training by analyzing its two core…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Zichen Liu , Changyu Chen , Wenjun Li , Penghui Qi , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Wee Sun Lee , Min Lin

Reinforcement learning (RL) is pivotal for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of diffusion large language models (dLLMs). However, existing dLLM policy optimization methods suffer from two critical reliability bottlenecks: (1) reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Leyi Pan , Shuchang Tao , Yunpeng Zhai , Zheyu Fu , Liancheng Fang , Minghua He , Lingzhe Zhang , Zhaoyang Liu , Bolin Ding , Aiwei Liu , Lijie Wen