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Reward models are central to both reinforcement learning (RL) with language models and inference-time verification. However, existing reward models often lack temporal consistency, leading to ineffective policy updates and unstable RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Dan Zhang , Min Cai , Jonathan Light , Ziniu Hu , Yisong Yue , Jie Tang

Markov decision problems are most commonly solved via dynamic programming. Another approach is Bellman residual minimization, which directly minimizes the squared Bellman residual objective function. However, compared to dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Donghwan Lee , Hyukjun Yang

Although well-established in general reinforcement learning (RL), value-based methods are rarely explored in constrained RL (CRL) for their incapability of finding policies that can randomize among multiple actions. To apply value-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Tianchi Cai , Wenpeng Zhang , Lihong Gu , Xiaodong Zeng , Jinjie Gu

Recent advances in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated strong performance on complex tasks through long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, their lengthy outputs increase computational costs and may lead to overthinking,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Bin Hong , Jiayu Liu , Kai Zhang , Jianwen Sun , Mengdi Zhang , Zhenya Huang

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated superior performance in enhancing the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs). However, this accuracy-oriented learning paradigm often suffers from entropy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Hongye Cao , Zhixin Bai , Ziyue Peng , Boyan Wang , Tianpei Yang , Jing Huo , Yuyao Zhang , Yang Gao

We study a common challenge in reinforcement learning for large language models (LLMs): the Zero-Reward Assumption, where non-terminal actions (i.e., intermediate token generations) receive zero task-specific immediate reward, while only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Shenghua He , Tian Xia , Xuan Zhou , Hui Wei

Large language models (LLMs) excel in tasks like question answering and dialogue, but complex tasks requiring interaction, such as negotiation and persuasion, require additional long-horizon reasoning and planning. Reinforcement learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Joey Hong , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning with verifiable reward has recently emerged as a central paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs); however, prevailing mean-based methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Tao Ren , Jinyang Jiang , Hui Yang , Wan Tian , Minhao Zou , Guanghao Li , Zishi Zhang , Qinghao Wang , Shentao Qin , Yanjun Zhao , Rui Tao , Hui Shao , Yijie Peng

Recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) demonstrate that sophisticated behaviors such as multi-step reasoning and self-reflection can emerge via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards~(\textit{RLVR}). However, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Jianhao Yan , Yafu Li , Zican Hu , Zhi Wang , Ganqu Cui , Xiaoye Qu , Yu Cheng , Yue Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is central to improving reasoning in large language models (LLMs) but typically requires ground-truth rewards. Test-Time Reinforcement Learning (TTRL) removes this need by using majority-vote rewards, but relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Aleksei Arzhantsev , Otmane Sakhi , Flavian Vasile

Large reasoning models (LRMs) are commonly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to explore long chain-of-thought reasoning, achieving strong performance at high computational cost. Recent methods add multi-reward objectives to jointly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anhao Zhao , Ziyang Chen , Junlong Tong , Yingqi Fan , Fanghua Ye , Shuhao Li , Yunpu Ma , Wenjie Li , Xiaoyu Shen

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) which seeks to learn a good policy based on a fixed, pre-collected dataset. A fundamental challenge behind this task is the distributional shift due to the dataset lacking sufficient exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Wenzhuo Zhou

Small Language Models (SLMs) are a cost-effective alternative to Large Language Models (LLMs), but often struggle with complex reasoning due to their limited capacity and a tendency to produce mistakes or inconsistent answers during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Yuanfeng Xu , Zehui Dai , Jian Liang , Jiapeng Guan , Guangrun Wang , Liang Lin , Xiaohui Lv

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging direct outcome verification instead of learned reward models. Building on this paradigm, Group…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Jingyi Wang , Lei Zhu , Tengjin Weng , Song-Li Wu , Haochen Tan , Jierun Chen , Chaofan Tao , Haoli Bai , Lu Hou , Lifeng Shang , Xiao-Ping Zhang

Tiny Recursive Models (TRM) solve complex reasoning tasks with a fraction of the parameters of modern large language models (LLMs) by iteratively refining a latent state and final answer. While powerful, their deterministic recursion can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Amin Sghaier , Ali Parviz , Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau

Reinforcement learning (RL) with tree search has demonstrated superior performance in traditional reasoning tasks. Compared to conventional independent chain sampling strategies with outcome supervision, tree search enables better…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Zhenyu Hou , Ziniu Hu , Yujiang Li , Rui Lu , Jie Tang , Yuxiao Dong

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) methods. However, a key limitation of existing approaches is that rewards defined at the full trajectory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Zhicheng Yang , Zhijiang Guo , Yinya Huang , Xiaodan Liang , Yiwei Wang , Jing Tang

In reinforcement learning, experience replay stores past samples for further reuse. Prioritized sampling is a promising technique to better utilize these samples. Previous criteria of prioritization include TD error, recentness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Xu-Hui Liu , Zhenghai Xue , Jing-Cheng Pang , Shengyi Jiang , Feng Xu , Yang Yu

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

Reward specification plays a central role in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding the agent's behavior. To express non-Markovian rewards, formalisms such as reward machines have been introduced to capture dependencies on histories. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Rajarshi Roy , Anirban Majumdar , Ritam Raha , David Parker , Marta Kwiatkowska