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Related papers: Reasoning with Exploration: An Entropy Perspective

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Encouraging exploration is a critical issue in deep reinforcement learning. We investigate the effect of initial entropy that significantly influences the exploration, especially at the earlier stage. Our main observations are as follows:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Sooyoung Jang , Hyung-Il Kim

A promising technique for exploration is to maximize the entropy of visited state distribution, i.e., state entropy, by encouraging uniform coverage of visited state space. While it has been effective for an unsupervised setup, it tends to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Dongyoung Kim , Jinwoo Shin , Pieter Abbeel , Younggyo Seo

In recent years, training methods centered on Reinforcement Learning (RL) have markedly enhanced the reasoning and alignment performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in understanding human intents, following user…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Keliang Liu , Dingkang Yang , Ziyun Qian , Weijie Yin , Yuchi Wang , Hongsheng Li , Jun Liu , Peng Zhai , Yang Liu , Lihua Zhang

Reinforcement Learning has demonstrated substantial improvements in the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), exhibiting significant applicability across various domains. Recent research has identified that tokens within LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Haomin Zhuang , Yujun Zhou , Taicheng Guo , Yue Huang , Fangxu Liu , Kai Song , Xiangliang Zhang

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Process-Supervised RL (PSRL) has emerged as a more effective paradigm compared to outcome-based RL. However,…

The ability to explore efficiently and effectively is a central challenge of reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider exploration through the lens of information theory. Specifically, we cast exploration as a problem of maximizing…

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

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) often rely on generating intermediate reasoning steps to enhance accuracy. However, little work has examined how reasoning utility contributes to the final answer's correctness. Due to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Xu Guo

We evaluate the ability of the current generation of large language models (LLMs) to help a decision-making agent facing an exploration-exploitation tradeoff. While previous work has largely study the ability of LLMs to solve combined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Keegan Harris , Aleksandrs Slivkins

Large language models achieve strong reasoning performance, yet existing decoding strategies either explore blindly (random sampling) or redundantly (independent multi-sampling). We propose Entropy-Tree, a tree-based decoding method that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Longxuan Wei , Yubo Zhang , Zijiao Zhang , Zhihu Wang , Shiwan Zhao , Tianyu Huang , Huiting Zhao , Chenfei Liu , Shenao Zhang , Junchi Yan

The ongoing debate on whether reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) expands or shrinks the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) remains unresolved. Some studies contend that RLVR mainly improves sampling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Xinhao Yao , Lu Yu , Xiaolin Hu , Fengwei Teng , Qing Cui , Jun Zhou , Yong Liu

Reinforcement Learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a primary learning paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs). However, during RL training, the enormous state space of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Zhuoxu Huang , Mengxi Jia , Hao Sun , Xuelong Li , Jungong Han

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in performing complex multi-step reasoning, yet they continue to struggle with mathematical reasoning, often making systematic errors. A promising solution is reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Hanning Zhang , Pengcheng Wang , Shizhe Diao , Yong Lin , Rui Pan , Hanze Dong , Dylan Zhang , Pavlo Molchanov , Tong Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has increasingly become a pivotal technique in the post-training of large language models (LLMs). The effective exploration of the output space is essential for the success of RL. We observe that for complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Shihan Dou , Muling Wu , Jingwen Xu , Rui Zheng , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Reinforcement learning has become the standard for improving reasoning in large language models, yet evidence increasingly suggests that RL does not teach new strategies; it redistributes probability mass over solutions the base model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Ömer Faruk Akgül , Rajgopal Kannan , Willie Neiswanger , Viktor Prasanna

This paper proposes \emph{Episodic and Lifelong Exploration via Maximum ENTropy} (ELEMENT), a novel, multiscale, intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning (RL) framework that is able to explore environments without using any extrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Hongming Li , Shujian Yu , Bin Liu , Jose C. Principe

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently demonstrated remarkable potential in enhancing the reasoning capability of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). However, RLVR often drives the policy toward over-determinism,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Shimin Zhang , Xianwei Chen , Yufan Shen , Ziyuan Ye , Jibin Wu

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) have notably progressed in multi-step and long-chain reasoning. However, extending their reasoning capabilities to encompass deep interactions with search remains a non-trivial challenge, as models often fail to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Qingfei Zhao , Ruobing Wang , Dingling Xu , Daren Zha , Limin Liu