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Recent analyses question whether reinforcement learning (RL) is responsible for strong reasoning in large language models (LLMs). At the same time, distillation and inference-time sampling, including power sampling, have emerged as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Akiyoshi Tomihari , Issei Sato

Reinforcement learning (RL) has played an important role in improving the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). Some studies apply RL directly to \textit{smaller} base models (known as zero-RL) and also achieve notable…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Xiao Hu , Xingyu Lu , Liyuan Mao , YiFan Zhang , Tianke Zhang , Bin Wen , Fan Yang , Tingting Gao , Guorui Zhou

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students. Most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Zhaoyang Zhang , Shuli Jiang , Yantao Shen , Yuting Zhang , Dhananjay Ram , Shuo Yang , Zhuowen Tu , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently demonstrated notable success in enhancing the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), particularly on mathematics and programming tasks. Similar to how…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Yang Yue , Zhiqi Chen , Rui Lu , Andrew Zhao , Zhaokai Wang , Yang Yue , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

Reasoning distillation aims to transfer multi-step reasoning capabilities from large language models to smaller, more efficient ones. While recent methods have shown promising gains, they typically rely on static teacher-student hierarchies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Khouloud Saadi , Di Wang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently strengthened LLM reasoning, but its focus on final answer correctness leaves a critical gap: it does not ensure the robustness of the reasoning process itself. We adopt a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Hyunseok Lee , Soheil Abbasloo , Jihoon Tack , Jinwoo Shin

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) stimulates the thinking processes of large language models (LLMs), substantially enhancing their reasoning abilities on verifiable tasks. It is often assumed that similar gains should…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Kaiyuan Li , Jing-Cheng Pang , Yang Yu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to substantially improve the reasoning capability of small and large language models (LLMs), but existing approaches typically rely on verifiable rewards, hence ground truth labels. We propose an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Yiyang Shen , Lifu Tu , Weiran Wang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a key method for improving Large Language Models' reasoning capabilities, yet recent evidence suggests it may paradoxically shrink the reasoning boundary rather than…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Phuc Minh Nguyen , Chinh D. La , Duy M. H. Nguyen , Nitesh V. Chawla , Binh T. Nguyen , Khoa D. Doan

This paper aims to explore the potential of combining Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) with Knowledge Distillation (KD) by distilling various DRL algorithms and studying their distillation effects. By doing so, the computational burden of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Guanlin Meng

Self-distillation has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for LLMs, often improving performance while shortening reasoning traces. However, in mathematical reasoning, we find that it can reduce response length while degrading…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Jeonghye Kim , Xufang Luo , Minbeom Kim , Sangmook Lee , Dohyung Kim , Jiwon Jeon , Dongsheng Li , Yuqing Yang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves reasoning in large language models but treats all correct solutions equally, potentially reinforcing flawed traces that get correct answers by chance. We observe that better…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Tiehua Mei , Minxuan Lv , Leiyu Pan , Zhenpeng Su , Hongru Hou , Hengrui Chen , Ao Xu , Deqing Yang

The push to compress and impart the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) into more deployable and efficient Small Language Models (SLMs) has benefited from improvements in knowledge distillation (KD) techniques. These techniques…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Shreyansh Padarha

Owing to their powerful semantic reasoning capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been effectively utilized as recommenders, achieving impressive performance. However, the high inference latency of LLMs significantly restricts…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Yu Cui , Feng Liu , Pengbo Wang , Bohao Wang , Heng Tang , Yi Wan , Jun Wang , Jiawei Chen

We introduce a novel approach to large language model (LLM) distillation by formulating it as a constrained reinforcement learning problem. While recent work has begun exploring the integration of task-specific rewards into distillation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Matthieu Zimmer , Xiaotong Ji , Tu Nguyen , Haitham Bou Ammar

Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) facilitates efficient inference by distilling multi-step diffusion models into few-step variants. Concurrently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a vital tool for aligning generative models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Dengyang Jiang , Dongyang Liu , Zanyi Wang , Qilong Wu , Liuzhuozheng Li , Hengzhuang Li , Xin Jin , David Liu , Changsheng Lu , Zhen Li , Bo Zhang , Mengmeng Wang , Steven Hoi , Peng Gao , Harry Yang

Training VideoLLMs for complex reasoning remains challenging due to sparse sequence level rewards and the lack of fine grained credit assignment over long, temporally grounded reasoning trajectories. While reinforcement learning with…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Hao Lin , Kunyang Lv , Xu Jiang , Jingqi Tian , Zhongjing Du , Jiayu Ding , Qiaoman Zhang , Hongbo Jin

Recent advancements in long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, particularly through the Group Relative Policy Optimization algorithm used by DeepSeek-R1, have led to significant interest in the potential of Reinforcement Learning with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Xumeng Wen , Zihan Liu , Shun Zheng , Shengyu Ye , Zhirong Wu , Yang Wang , Zhijian Xu , Xiao Liang , Junjie Li , Ziming Miao , Jiang Bian , Mao Yang

Distilling robust reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs) into smaller, computationally efficient student models remains an unresolved challenge. Despite recent advances, distilled models frequently suffer from superficial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Zhen Tan , Chengshuai Zhao , Song Wang , Jundong Li , Tianlong Chen , Huan Liu

Mathematical reasoning is a central challenge for large language models (LLMs), requiring not only correct answers but also faithful reasoning processes. Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Md Tanvirul Alam , Nidhi Rastogi
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