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Related papers: Learning to Reason without External Rewards

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Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) on chain-of-thought reasoning has become a standard part of language model post-training recipes. A common assumption is that the reasoning chains trained through RLVR reliably represent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Qinan Yu , Alexa Tartaglini , Peter Hase , Carlos Guestrin , Christopher Potts

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for Large Reasoning Models hinges on baseline estimation for variance reduction, but existing approaches pay a heavy price: PPO requires a policy-model scale critic, while GRPO needs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yunho Choi , Jongwon Lim , Woojin Ahn , Minjae Oh , Jeonghoon Shim , Yohan Jo

Current techniques for post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) rely either on costly human supervision or on external verifiers to boost performance on tasks such as mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, as LLMs improve…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Mukesh Ghimire , Aosong Feng , Liwen You , Youzhi Luo , Fang Liu , Xuan Zhu

Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce hallucinated or unverifiable content, undermining their reliability in factual domains. This work investigates Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) as a training paradigm that…

Recent advances of Reinforcement Learning (RL) have highlighted its potential in complex reasoning tasks, yet effective training often relies on external supervision, which limits the broader applicability. In this work, we propose a novel…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Kongcheng Zhang , Qi Yao , Shunyu Liu , Yingjie Wang , Baisheng Lai , Jieping Ye , Mingli Song , Dacheng Tao

We show that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can elicit strong mathematical reasoning in certain language models even with spurious rewards that have little, no, or even negative correlation with the correct answer.…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective approach for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). The Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) family has demonstrated strong…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Chenxi Liu , Junjie Liang , Yuqi Jia , Bochuan Cao , Yang Bai , Heng Huang , Xun Chen

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves language model reasoning by using rule-based rewards in verifiable domains such as mathematics and code. However, RLVR leads to limited generalization for open-ended tasks --…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Adithya Bhaskar , Xi Ye , Danqi Chen

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) enhances the reasoning of large language models (LLMs), but standard RLVR often depends on human-annotated answers or carefully curated reward specifications. In machine-checkable…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Xinjie Chen , Biao Fu , Jing Wu , Guoxin Chen , Xinggao Liu , Dayiheng Liu , Minpeng Liao

The successes of reinforcement learning in recent years are underpinned by the characterization of suitable reward functions. However, in settings where such rewards are non-intuitive, difficult to define, or otherwise error-prone in their…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Mohammad Afzal , Sankalp Gambhir , Ashutosh Gupta , Krishna S , Ashutosh Trivedi , Alvaro Velasquez

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard paradigm for refining large language models (LLMs) beyond pre-training and instruction tuning. A prominent line of work is RL with verifiable rewards (RLVR), which leverages automatically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Bonan Zhang , Zhongqi Chen , Bowen Song , Qinya Li , Fan Wu , Guihai Chen

Unsupervised reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (URLVR) offers a pathway to scale LLM training beyond the supervision bottleneck by deriving rewards without ground truth labels. Recent works leverage model intrinsic signals,…

The prevailing paradigm for training large reasoning models--combining Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR)--is fundamentally constrained by its reliance on high-quality, human-annotated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yuanfu Wang , Zhixuan Liu , Xiangtian Li , Chaochao Lu , Chao Yang

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has proven effective in training large reasoning models (LRMs) by leveraging answer-verifiable signals to guide policy optimization, which, however, suffers from high annotation costs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Shenzhi Yang , Guangcheng Zhu , Xing Zheng , Yingfan MA , Zhongqi Chen , Bowen Song , Weiqiang Wang , Junbo Zhao , Gang Chen , Haobo Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled machine learning models to achieve significant advances in many fields. Most recently, RL has empowered frontier language models to solve challenging math, science, and coding problems. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Mihir Prabhudesai , Lili Chen , Alex Ippoliti , Katerina Fragkiadaki , Hao Liu , Deepak Pathak

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

While reinforcement learning (RL) demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of language models, the training dynamics of RL in LLMs remain unclear. In this work, we provide an explanation of the RL training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xingwu Chen , Tianle Li , Difan Zou

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a powerful framework for improving the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, current methods such as GRPO rely only on problems where the model responses to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Thanh-Long V. Le , Myeongho Jeon , Kim Vu , Viet Lai , Eunho Yang

Existing large language models (LLMs) face challenges of following complex instructions, especially when multiple constraints are present and organized in paralleling, chaining, and branching structures. One intuitive solution, namely…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Yulei Qin , Gang Li , Zongyi Li , Zihan Xu , Yuchen Shi , Zhekai Lin , Xiao Cui , Ke Li , Xing Sun

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason often relies on Reinforcement Learning (RL) with task-specific verifiers. However, many real-world reasoning-intensive tasks lack verifiers, despite offering abundant expert demonstrations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Locke Cai , Ivan Provilkov