Related papers: Effective Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning in …
Large language models are increasingly used for complex reasoning tasks where high-quality offline data such as expert-annotated solutions and distilled reasoning traces are often available. However, in environments with sparse rewards,…
We propose reinforcement learning (RL) strategies tailored for reasoning in large language models (LLMs) under strict memory and compute limits, with a particular focus on compatibility with LoRA fine-tuning. Building on early policy…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) that can continually improve beyond their training budgets are able to solve increasingly difficult problems by adapting at test time, a property we refer to as extrapolation. However, standard reinforcement…
AI alignment in the shape of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is increasingly treated as a crucial ingredient for high performance large language models. Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has been positioned by recent…
While Reinforcement Learning (RL) shows promise in training tool-use Large Language Models (LLMs) using verifiable outcome rewards, existing methods largely overlook the potential of reasoning rewards based on chain-of-thought quality for…
Generating grounded and trustworthy responses remains a key challenge for large language models (LLMs). While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with citation-based grounding holds promise, instruction-tuned models frequently fail even in…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach to improve large language model (LLM) reasoning, yet most open efforts focus narrowly on math and code, limiting our understanding of its broader applicability to general…
Recently DeepSeek R1 has shown that reinforcement learning (RL) can substantially improve the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) through a simple yet effective design. The core of R1 lies in its rule-based reward…
Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have substantially enhanced the planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the theoretical basis for their effectiveness remains elusive. In this work, we investigate RL's benefits…
Robotic foundation models require reasoning over complex visual scenes to execute adaptive actions in dynamic environments. While recent studies on latent-reasoning Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated the capability to…
The reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) can be unleashed with reinforcement learning (RL) (OpenAI, 2024; DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025a; Zeng et al., 2025). The success of existing RL attempts in LLMs usually rely on high-quality…
Recent advancements in large reasoning models (LRMs) have significantly enhanced language models' capabilities in complex problem-solving by emulating human-like deliberative thinking. However, these models often exhibit overthinking (i.e.,…
This dissertation investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) methods can be designed to be safe, sample-efficient, and robust. Framed through the unifying perspective of contextual-bandit RL, the work addresses two major application…
With respect to improving the reasoning accuracy of LLMs, the representative reinforcement learning (RL) method GRPO faces failure due to insignificant reward variance, while verification methods based on process reward models (PRMs) suffer…
Researchers have demonstrated that Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a powerful tool for finding policies that perform well on complex robotic systems. However, these policies are often unpredictable and can induce highly variable…
Large Vision-Language Action (VLA) models have shown significant potential for embodied AI. However, their predominant training via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) limits generalization due to susceptibility to compounding errors under…
The reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly, particularly following the release of DeepSeek R1, which has inspired a surge of research into data quality and reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms.…
Residual Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular approach for adapting pretrained policies by learning a lightweight residual policy that provides corrective actions. While Residual RL is more sample-efficient than finetuning the entire…
The availability of large pre-trained models is changing the landscape of Machine Learning research and practice, moving from a training-from-scratch to a fine-tuning paradigm. While in some applications the goal is to "nudge" the…