English
Related papers

Related papers: Learning to Reason without External Rewards

200 papers

Extrinsic rewards can effectively guide reinforcement learning (RL) agents in specific tasks. However, extrinsic rewards frequently fall short in complex environments due to the significant human effort needed for their design and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Mingqi Yuan , Roger Creus Castanyer , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng , Glen Berseth

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to reason during post-training typically relies on reinforcement learning with explicit outcome- or process-based reward functions. However, in many real-world settings, obtaining or defining such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Claudio Fanconi , Nicolás Astorga , Mihaela van der Schaar

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has shown promise in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models by learning directly from outcome-based rewards. Recent RLVR works that operate under the zero setting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Andrew Zhao , Yiran Wu , Yang Yue , Tong Wu , Quentin Xu , Yang Yue , Matthieu Lin , Shenzhi Wang , Qingyun Wu , Zilong Zheng , Gao Huang

Process rewards have been widely used in deep reinforcement learning to improve training efficiency, reduce variance, and prevent reward hacking. In LLM reasoning, existing works also explore various solutions for learning effective process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Xian Wu , Kaijie Zhu , Ying Zhang , Lun Wang , Wenbo Guo

Reward inference (learning a reward model from human preferences) is a critical intermediate step in the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) pipeline for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs). In practice, RLHF faces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Qining Zhang , Lei Ying

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) trains large language models (LLMs) from sampled trajectories, making decoding strategy a core component of learning rather than a purely inference-time choice. Sampling temperature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Yixiao Zhou , Yang Li , Dongzhou Cheng , Hehe Fan , Yu Cheng

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with problems that require multi-step reasoning. For small-scale open-source models, Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) fails when correct solutions are rarely sampled even…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yihe Deng , I-Hung Hsu , Jun Yan , Zifeng Wang , Rujun Han , Gufeng Zhang , Yanfei Chen , Wei Wang , Tomas Pfister , Chen-Yu Lee

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, existing methods suffer from an exploration dilemma: the sharply peaked initial…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yuhua Jiang , Jiawei Huang , Yufeng Yuan , Xin Mao , Yu Yue , Qianchuan Zhao , Lin Yan

Large Language Models (LLMs) show great promise in complex reasoning, with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) being a key enhancement strategy. However, a prevalent issue is ``superficial self-reflection'', where models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Xiaoyuan Liu , Tian Liang , Zhiwei He , Jiahao Xu , Wenxuan Wang , Pinjia He , Zhaopeng Tu , Haitao Mi , Dong Yu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to substantially improve the reasoning capability of small and large language models (LLMs), but existing approaches typically rely on verifiable rewards, hence ground truth labels. We propose an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Yiyang Shen , Lifu Tu , Weiran Wang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models, particularly in domains such as mathematics where reliable rule-based verifiers can be constructed.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Changyi Xiao , Caijun Xu , Yixin Cao

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a key technique for enhancing large language models (LLMs), with verification engineering playing a central role. However, best practices for RL in instruction following…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Hao Peng , Yunjia Qi , Xiaozhi Wang , Bin Xu , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) demonstrates significant potential in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing RLVR methods are often constrained by issues such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Jinpeng Wang , Chao Li , Ting Ye , Mengyuan Zhang , Wei Liu , Jian Luan

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for complex reasoning tasks with clear correctness signals such as math and coding. However, extending it to real-world reasoning tasks is challenging, as evaluation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Anisha Gunjal , Anthony Wang , Elaine Lau , Vaskar Nath , Yunzhong He , Bing Liu , Sean Hendryx

Recent work shows that large multimodal models (LMMs) can self-improve from unlabeled data via self-play and intrinsic feedback. Yet existing self-evolving frameworks mainly reward final outcomes, leaving intermediate reasoning weakly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Meghana Sunil , Manikandarajan Venmathimaran , Muthu Subash Kavitha

The recent paradigm shift towards training large language models (LLMs) using DeepSeek-R1-Zero-style reinforcement learning (RL) on verifiable rewards has led to impressive advancements in code and mathematical reasoning. However, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Xiangxin Zhou , Zichen Liu , Anya Sims , Haonan Wang , Tianyu Pang , Chongxuan Li , Liang Wang , Min Lin , Chao Du

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), learning from fixed datasets presents a promising solution for domains where real-time interaction with the environment is expensive or risky. However, designing dense reward signals for offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Younghwan Lee , Tung M. Luu , Donghoon Lee , Chang D. Yoo

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves LLM reasoning, yet growing evidence indicates an exploration ceiling: it often reweights existing solution traces rather than discovering new strategies, limiting gains under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Bizhe Bai , Xinyue Wang , Peng Ye , Tao Chen

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a promising approach for training language models (LMs) on reasoning tasks that elicit emergent long chains of thought (CoTs). Unlike supervised learning, it updates the model using…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Xinyu Zhu , Mengzhou Xia , Zhepei Wei , Wei-Lin Chen , Danqi Chen , Yu Meng

Recent advances demonstrate that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, standard RLVR faces challenges with reward sparsity, where…