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Large language models (LLMs) offer substantial promise for text classification in political science, yet their effectiveness often depends on high-quality prompts and exemplars. To address this, we introduce a three-stage framework that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Menglin Liu , Ge Shi

Scaling test-time compute has emerged as a powerful mechanism for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) performance. However, standard post-training paradigms, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), optimize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Adam Ousherovitch , Ambuj Tewari

Existing methods to enhance the reasoning capability of large language models predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL) on reasoning-specific data. These approaches critically depend on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Qingyang Zhang , Haitao Wu , Changqing Zhang , Peilin Zhao , Yatao Bian

Answering real-world open-domain multi-hop questions over massive corpora is a critical challenge in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Recent research employs reinforcement learning (RL) to end-to-end optimize the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Yu Liu , Wenxiao Zhang , Cong Cao , Wenxuan Lu , Fangfang Yuan , Diandian Guo , Kun Peng , Qiang Sun , Kaiyan Zhang , Yanbing Liu , Jin B. Hong , Bowen Zhou , Zhiyuan Ma

Neural ranking models (NRMs) have become one of the most important techniques in information retrieval (IR). Due to the limitation of relevance labels, the training of NRMs heavily relies on negative sampling over unlabeled data. In general…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Yinqiong Cai , Jiafeng Guo , Yixing Fan , Qingyao Ai , Ruqing Zhang , Xueqi Cheng

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become an effective paradigm for improving reasoning language models on tasks such as mathematics, coding, and scientific question answering. However, widely used group-relative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Redacted by arXiv

Contemporary progress in large language models (LLMs) has revealed notable inferential capacities via reinforcement learning (RL) employing verifiable reward, facilitating the development of O1 and R1-like reasoning models. Directly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Zexu Sun , Yongcheng Zeng , Erxue Min , Heyang Gao , Bokai Ji , Xu Chen

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited extraordinary performance in a variety of tasks while it remains challenging for them to solve complex multi-step tasks as agents. In practice, agents sensitive to the outcome of certain key steps…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Zilong Wang , Jingfeng Yang , Sreyashi Nag , Samarth Varshney , Xianfeng Tang , Haoming Jiang , Jingbo Shang , Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become the core paradigm for aligning and strengthening large language models (LLMs). Yet, applying RL in off-policy settings--where stale data from past policies are used for training--improves…

Despite advances in Preference Alignment (PA) for Large Language Models (LLMs), mainstream methods like Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) face notable challenges. These approaches require high-quality datasets of positive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-10 Xiaohua Feng , Yuyuan Li , Huwei Ji , Jiaming Zhang , Li Zhang , Tianyu Du , Chaochao Chen

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve higher performance on challenging reasoning tasks by generating more tokens at inference time, but this verbosity often wastes computation on easy problems. Existing solutions, including supervised…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Violet Xiang , Chase Blagden , Rafael Rafailov , Nathan Lile , Sang Truong , Chelsea Finn , Nick Haber

Traditional on-policy Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) frameworks suffer from experience waste and reward homogeneity, which directly hinders learning efficiency on difficult samples during large language models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Xu Wan , Yansheng Wang , Wenqi Huang , Mingyang Sun

Personalized retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) aims to produce user-tailored responses by incorporating retrieved user profiles alongside the input query. Existing methods primarily focus on improving retrieval and rely on large language…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Kepu Zhang , Teng Shi , Weijie Yu , Jun Xu

We argue that decomposing reward into weighted, verifiable criteria and using an LLM judge to score them provides a partial-credit optimization signal: instead of a binary outcome or a single holistic score, each response is graded along…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Manish Bhattarai , Ismael Boureima , Nishath Rajiv Ranasinghe , Scott Pakin , Dan O'Malley

This paper proposes a novel formulation for reinforcement learning (RL) with large language models, explaining why and under what conditions the true sequence-level reward can be optimized via a surrogate token-level objective in policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Chujie Zheng , Kai Dang , Bowen Yu , Mingze Li , Huiqiang Jiang , Junrong Lin , Yuqiong Liu , Hao Lin , Chencan Wu , Feng Hu , An Yang , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a crucial fine-grained task in social media scenarios to identify the sentiment polarity of specific aspect terms in a sentence. Although many existing studies leverage large language models (LLMs)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Junjie Liu , Yuanhe Tian , Yan Song

Modern reasoning agents are increasingly evaluated on their ability to generate multiple valid solution paths, plans, or tool-use traces for a given input. Standard reward-maximizing RL tends to collapse onto the most easily reinforced…

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 outstanding capabilities of large language models (LLMs) render them a crucial component in various autonomous agent systems. While traditional methods depend on the inherent knowledge of LLMs without fine-tuning, more recent approaches…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Zhirui Deng , Zhicheng Dou , Yutao Zhu , Ji-Rong Wen , Ruibin Xiong , Mang Wang , Weipeng Chen

Reinforcement learning for multi-step reasoning with large language models (LLMs) typically relies on sparse terminal rewards, which creates a poorly conditioned credit-assignment problem: the final feedback is propagated uniformly across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Fei Ding , Yongkang Zhang , Youwei Wang , Zijian Zeng