English
Related papers

Related papers: Maximizing Confidence Alone Improves Reasoning

200 papers

While reinforcement learning (RL) has been successful in natural language processing (NLP) domains such as dialogue generation and text-based games, it typically faces the problem of sparse rewards that leads to slow or no convergence.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Ameet Deshpande , Eve Fleisig

Recently, deep reasoning LLMs (e.g., OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1) have shown promising performance in various downstream tasks. Free translation is an important and interesting task in the multilingual world, which requires going beyond…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Jiaan Wang , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in complex reasoning tasks through both post-training and test-time scaling laws. While prevalent test-time scaling approaches are often realized by using external reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Fuxiang Zhang , Jiacheng Xu , Chaojie Wang , Ce Cui , Yang Liu , Bo An

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance via extended chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet suffer from excessive token consumption and high inference latency. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for CoT…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Tingcheng Bian , Yuzhe Zhang , Jing Jin , Jinchang Luo , MingQuan Cheng , Haiwei Wang , Wenyuan Jiang , Miaohui Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled complex reasoning abilities in large language models (LLMs). However, most RL algorithms suffer from performance saturation, preventing continued gains as RL training scales. This problem can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Bolian Li , Yifan Wang , Yi Ding , Anamika Lochab , Ananth Grama , Ruqi Zhang

The application of reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) constitutes a rapidly advancing research area. While MLLMs extend Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Guanghao Zhou , Panjia Qiu , Cen Chen , Jie Wang , Zheming Yang , Jian Xu , Minghui Qiu

Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. A popular alternative is reward learning, where reward functions are inferred from human feedback rather than manually specified.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Chaitanya Kharyal , Calarina Muslimani , Matthew E. Taylor

Learning to rank (LTR) plays a crucial role in various Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. Although supervised LTR methods based on fine-grained relevance labels (e.g., document-level annotations) have achieved significant success, their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Yiteng Tu , Zhichao Xu , Tao Yang , Weihang Su , Yujia Zhou , Yiqun Liu , Fen Lin , Qin Liu , Qingyao Ai

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach for learning control policies directly from high-dimensional state and observation. However, it tends to be data-inefficient, which is especially costly in robotic learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-10-14 Xubo Lyu , Mo Chen

Test-time scaling methods have seen a rapid increase in popularity for its computational efficiency and parameter-independent training to improve reasoning performance on Large Language Models. One such method is called budget forcing, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Ravindra Aribowo Tarunokusumo , Rafael Fernandes Cunha

Modern Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms require estimates of the maximal Q-value, which are difficult to compute in continuous domains with an infinite number of possible actions. In this work, we introduce a new update rule for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Divyansh Garg , Joey Hejna , Matthieu Geist , Stefano Ermon

We investigate an entropy-regularized reinforcement learning (RL) approach to optimal stopping problems motivated by real option models. Classical stopping rules are strict and non-randomized, limiting natural exploration in RL settings. To…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-18 Jodi Dianetti , Giorgio Ferrari , Renyuan Xu

Can language models improve their reasoning performance without external rewards, using only their own sampled responses for training? We show that they can. We propose Self-evolving Post-Training (SePT), a simple post-training method that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Mengqi Li , Lei Zhao , Anthony Man-Cho So , Ruoyu Sun , Xiao Li

Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is an approach wherein the experience gained from solving a variety of tasks is distilled into a meta-policy. The meta-policy, when adapted over only a small (or just a single) number of steps, is able…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Desik Rengarajan , Sapana Chaudhary , Jaewon Kim , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has markedly improved the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on tasks requiring multi-step reasoning. However, most RLVR pipelines rely on sparse outcome-based rewards,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Runquan Gui , Yafu Li , Xiaoye Qu , Ziyan Liu , Yeqiu Cheng , Yu Cheng

In constrained reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to not only optimize the overall reward but also satisfy the additional safety, diversity, or budget constraints. Consequently, existing constrained RL solutions require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Chi Jin

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been shown to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), enabling the development of large reasoning models (LRMs). However, LRMs such as DeepSeek-R1 and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Yuhao Wang , Xiaopeng Li , Cheng Gong , Ziru Liu , Suiyun Zhang , Rui Liu , Xiangyu Zhao

Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach for improving the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) system. However, due to its instability, successfully RL training is challenging,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-28 Lijun Wu , Fei Tian , Tao Qin , Jianhuang Lai , Tie-Yan Liu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to improve the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, applying RL to open-domain tasks faces two key challenges: (1) the inherent subjectivity of these tasks prevents the verifiable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Weixuan Ou , Yanzhao Zheng , Shuoshuo Sun , Wei Zhang , Baohua Dong , Hangcheng Zhu , Ruohui Huang , Gang Yu , Pengwei Yan , Yifan Qiao

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. However, existing approaches mainly rely on imitation learning and struggle to achieve effective test-time scaling. While reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Zhenyu Hou , Xin Lv , Rui Lu , Jiajie Zhang , Yujiang Li , Zijun Yao , Juanzi Li , Jie Tang , Yuxiao Dong