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Large language models (LLMs) struggle with complex, long-horizon reasoning due to instability caused by their frozen policy assumption. Current test-time scaling methods treat execution feedback merely as an external signal for filtering or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zhengbo Jiao , Hongyu Xian , Qinglong Wang , Yunpu Ma , Zhebo Wang , Zifan Zhang , Dezhang Kong , Meng Han

As large language model agents tackle increasingly complex long-horizon tasks, effective post-training becomes critical. Prior work faces fundamental challenges: outcome-only rewards fail to precisely attribute credit to intermediate steps,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Mukai Li , Qingcheng Zeng , Tianqing Fang , Zhenwen Liang , Linfeng Song , Qi Liu , Haitao Mi , Dong Yu

Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems are increasingly taking the form of sophisticated modular pipelines, e.g., Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), where each module may involve a distinct Language Model (LM) and an associated prompt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Dilara Soylu , Christopher Potts , Omar Khattab

Reinforcement Learning, particularly through policy gradient methods, has played a central role in enabling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, the optimization stability of policy gradients in this setting remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Luckeciano C. Melo , Alessandro Abate , Yarin Gal

The enhancement of reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs) has garnered significant attention, with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning emerging as dominant paradigms. While recent studies recognize the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Zhijie Wang

Recommendation systems leverage user interaction data to suggest relevant items while filtering out irrelevant (negative) ones. The rise of large language models (LLMs) has garnered increasing attention for their potential in recommendation…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Chenlu Ding , Daoxuan Liu , Jiancan Wu , Xingyu Hu , Junkang Wu , Haitao Wang , Yongkang Wang , Xingxing Wang , Xiang Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a key paradigm for aligning and optimizing large language models (LLMs). Standard approaches treat the LLM as the policy and apply RL directly over the full vocabulary space. However, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Jing-Cheng Pang , Liang Lu , Xian Tang , Kun Jiang , Sijie Wu , Kai Zhang , Xubin Li

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate strong performance on complex tasks but often suffer from excessive verbosity, known as "overthinking." Existing solutions via reinforcement learning (RL) typically penalize generated tokens to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Canhui Wu , Qiong Cao , Chang Li , Zhenfang Wang , Chao Xue , Yuwei Fan , Wei Xi , Xiaodong He

Low sample efficiency is an enduring challenge of reinforcement learning (RL). With the advent of versatile large language models (LLMs), recent works impart common-sense knowledge to accelerate policy learning for RL processes. However, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Fuxiang Zhang , Junyou Li , Yi-Chen Li , Zongzhang Zhang , Yang Yu , Deheng Ye

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has advanced LLM reasoning, applying it to long-context scenarios is hindered by sparsity of outcome rewards. This limitation fails to penalize ungrounded "lucky guesses," leaving the critical process of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Xin Guan , Zijian Li , Shen Huang , Pengjun Xie , Jingren Zhou , Jiuxin Cao

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong reasoning performance by allocating substantial computation at inference time, often generating long and verbose reasoning traces. While recent work on efficient reasoning reduces this overhead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Han Wang , Xiaodong Yu , Jialian Wu , Jiang Liu , Ximeng Sun , Mohit Bansal , Zicheng Liu

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is intended to improve their reasoning capabilities, yet we uncover a counterintuitive effect: models often forget how to solve problems they previously answered correctly during training. We term…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Yuetai Li , Zhangchen Xu , Fengqing Jiang , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Luyao Niu , Bill Yuchen Lin , Xiang Yue , Radha Poovendran

This paper investigates to what extent one can improve reinforcement learning algorithms. Our study is split in three parts. First, our analysis shows that the classical asymptotic convergence rate $O(1/\sqrt{N})$ is pessimistic and can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-25 Othmane Mounjid , Charles-Albert Lehalle

Unsupervised speech emotion recognition (SER) focuses on addressing the problem of data sparsity and annotation bias of emotional speech. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising method which enhances the performance through rule-based or…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-09 Yingying Gao , Shilei Zhang , Runyan Yang , Zihao Cui , Junlan Feng

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in solving complex mathematical problems, yet they still fall short of producing accurate and consistent solutions. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a framework for aligning these models with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ali Hatamizadeh , Shrimai Prabhumoye , Igor Gitman , Ximing Lu , Seungju Han , Wei Ping , Yejin Choi , Jan Kautz

A significant portion of recent research on Large Language Model (LLM) alignment focuses on developing new policy optimization methods based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Two prominent directions have emerged: (i) a shift…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Svetlana Glazyrina , Maksim Kryzhanovskiy , Roman Ischenko

In natural language processing tasks, pure reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning methods often suffer from inefficient exploration and slow convergence; while supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods, although efficient in training, have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Min Zeng , Jingfei Sun , Xueyou Luo , Caiquan Liu , Shiqi Zhang , Li Xie , Xiaoxin Chen

Since the release of Deepseek-R1, reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a central approach for training large language models (LLMs) on reasoning tasks. Recent work has largely focused on modifying loss functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Weizhe Chen , Sven Koenig , Bistra Dilkina

Recent large reasoning models (LRMs) driven by reinforcement learning algorithms (e.g., GRPO) have achieved remarkable performance on challenging reasoning tasks. However, these models suffer from overthinking, generating unnecessarily long…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Gang Li , Yan Chen , Ming Lin , Tianbao Yang

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has recently advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While prior work has emphasized algorithmic design, data curation, and reward shaping, we investigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Xinjie Chen , Minpeng Liao , Guoxin Chen , Chengxi Li , Biao Fu , Kai Fan , Xinggao Liu