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Related papers: Maximizing Confidence Alone Improves Reasoning

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This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-17 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Dale Schuurmans

Large language models (LLMs) excel at reasoning, yet post-training remains critical for aligning their behavior with task goals. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods often depend on costly human annotations or external reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Pengyi Li , Matvey Skripkin , Alexander Zubrey , Andrey Kuznetsov , Ivan Oseledets

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a prevailing approach for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. Among recent methods, GRPO stands out for its empirical success in training models such as DeepSeek-R1,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Wei Xiong , Jiarui Yao , Yuhui Xu , Bo Pang , Lei Wang , Doyen Sahoo , Junnan Li , Nan Jiang , Tong Zhang , Caiming Xiong , Hanze Dong

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in training large language models (LLMs) for preventing unexpected outputs, eg reducing harmfulness and errors. However, existing RL methods mostly adopt the instance-level reward, which is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Zhipeng Chen , Kun Zhou , Wayne Xin Zhao , Junchen Wan , Fuzheng Zhang , Di Zhang , Ji-Rong Wen

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs) to improve reasoning. Approaches like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Yanzhi Zhang , Zhaoxi Zhang , Haoxiang Guan , Yilin Cheng , Yitong Duan , Chen Wang , Yue Wang , Shuxin Zheng , Jiyan He

Reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly improved the reasoning ability of large language models. However, current reward models underperform in challenging reasoning scenarios and predominant RL training paradigms rely on rule-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Meng Zhou , Bei Li , Jiahao Liu , Xiaowen Shi , Yang Bai , Rongxiang Weng , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai

Maximum entropy (MaxEnt) RL maximizes a combination of the original task reward and an entropy reward. It is believed that the regularization imposed by entropy, on both policy improvement and policy evaluation, together contributes to good…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Haonan Yu , Haichao Zhang , Wei Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially improved the ability of large language model (LLM) agents to interact with environments and solve multi-turn tasks. However, effective agentic RL remains challenging: sparse outcome-only rewards…

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Shang Hong Sim , Tej Deep Pala , Vernon Toh , Hai Leong Chieu , Amir Zadeh , Chuan Li , Navonil Majumder , Soujanya Poria

Training large language models (LLMs) for complex reasoning via Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is effective but limited by reliance on costly, domain-specific supervision. We explore Reinforcement Learning from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Xuandong Zhao , Zhewei Kang , Aosong Feng , Sergey Levine , Dawn Song

Large language models can generate solutions to complex problems, but training them with reinforcement learning typically requires verifiable rewards that are expensive to create and not possible for all domains. We demonstrate that LLMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Toby Simonds , Kevin Lopez , Akira Yoshiyama , Dominique Garmier

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a branch of machine learning which is employed to solve various sequential decision making problems without proper supervision. Due to the recent advancement of deep learning, the newly proposed Deep-RL…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-04-17 Dhruv Ramani

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning ability of large language models, yet training remains costly because many rollouts contribute little to optimization, considering the amount of computation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Yan Sun , Jia Guo , Stanley Kok , Zihao Wang , Zujie Wen , Zhiqiang Zhang

Scaling model size and training data has led to great advances in the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the diminishing returns of this approach necessitate alternative methods to improve model capabilities, particularly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Daman Arora , Andrea Zanette

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves reasoning in large language models but treats all correct solutions equally, potentially reinforcing flawed traces that get correct answers by chance. We observe that better…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Tiehua Mei , Minxuan Lv , Leiyu Pan , Zhenpeng Su , Hongru Hou , Hengrui Chen , Ao Xu , Deqing Yang

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have attracted much attention due to their exceptional performance. However, their performance mainly stems from thinking, a long Chain of Thought (CoT), which significantly increase computational overhead. To…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Siyuan Gan , Jiaheng Liu , Boyan Wang , Tianpei Yang , Runqing Miao , Yuyao Zhang , Fanyu Meng , Junlan Feng , Linjian Meng , Jing Huo , Yang Gao

Large reasoning models (LRMs) extend large language models by generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, significantly improving mathematical and logical problem solving. However, this explicit reasoning process also introduces…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Jinghan Jia , Nathalie Baracaldo , Sijia Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou

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

Large reasoning models (LRMs) aim to solve diverse and complex problems through structured reasoning. Recent advances in group-based policy optimization methods have shown promise in enabling stable advantage estimation without reliance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zhizheng Jiang , Kang Zhao , Weikai Xu , Xinkui Lin , Wei Liu , Jian Luan , Shuo Shang , Peng Han