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Related papers: Reasoning with Exploration: An Entropy Perspective

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Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful approach to enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), while its mechanisms are not yet well understood. In this work, we undertake a…

Large Language Models (LLMs) consistently benefit from scaled Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, but also suffer from heavy computational overhead. To address this issue, efficient reasoning aims to incentivize short yet accurate thinking…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Taiqiang Wu , Zenan Xu , Bo Zhou , Ngai Wong

The advancement of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift from reactive ``fast thinking'' text generation to systematic, step-by-step ``slow thinking'' reasoning, unlocking state-of-the-art performance in complex…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Junyao Yang , Chen Qian , Kun Wang , Linfeng Zhang , Quanshi Zhang , Yong Liu , Dongrui Liu

The exploration--exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning (RL) is a well-known and much-studied problem that balances greedy action selection with novel experience, and the study of exploration methods is usually only considered in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Jonathan C Balloch , Julia Kim , and Jessica L Inman , Mark O Riedl

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated strong potential in training large language models (LLMs) capable of complex reasoning for real-world problem solving. More recently, RL has been leveraged to create sophisticated LLM-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Bowen Jin , Jinsung Yoon , Priyanka Kargupta , Sercan O. Arik , Jiawei Han

This paper investigates Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in long-horizon, multi-turn scenarios. Although RL algorithms such as Group Relative Policy…

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced general-purpose reasoning, showing strong performance across diverse tasks. However, existing methods often rely on implicit exploration, where the model follows stochastic and unguided reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Jiaxiang Chen , Zhuo Wang , Mingxi Zou , Zhucong Li , Zhijian Zhou , Song Wang , Zenglin Xu

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are two powerful approaches for building autonomous agents. However, due to limited understanding of the game environment, agents often resort to inefficient exploration and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Ziyu Chen , Zhiqing Xiao , Xinbei Jiang , Junbo Zhao

Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to expand the capabilities of language models, but it is unclear if current RL techniques promote the discovery of novel behaviors, or simply sharpen those already present in the base model. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Jens Tuyls , Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Jordan T. Ash

Post-training techniques combined with inference-time scaling significantly enhance the reasoning and alignment capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, a fundamental tension arises: inference-time methods benefit from diverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Changhao Li , Yuchen Zhuang , Chenxiao Gao , Haotian Sun , Rushi Qiang , Chao Zhang , Bo Dai

Deep reinforcement learning was instigated with the presence of trust region methods, being scalable and efficient. However, the pessimism of such algorithms, among which it forces to constrain in a trust region by all means, has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Jianfei Ma

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

Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) has shown remarkable potential in large language model-based (LLM) agents. These works can empower LLM agents to tackle complex tasks via multi-step, tool-integrated reasoning. However, an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Siwei Zhang , Yun Xiong , Xi Chen , Zi'an Jia , Renhong Huang , Jiarong Xu , Jiawei Zhang

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has proven effective in enhancing the reasoning of large language models (LLMs). Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-based extensions improve upon vanilla RLVR (e.g., GRPO) by providing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Ziqi Zhao , Zhaochun Ren , Jiahong Zou , Liu Yang , Zhiwei Xu , Xuri Ge , Zhumin Chen , Xinyu Ma , Daiting Shi , Shuaiqiang Wang , Dawei Yin , Xin Xin

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

Large reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex reasoning tasks, yet the excessive length of their chain-of-thought outputs remains a major practical bottleneck due to high computation cost and poor deployability.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Hourun Zhu , Yang Gao , Wenlong Fei , Jiawei Li , Huashan Sun

The Exploration-Exploitation tradeoff arises in Reinforcement Learning when one cannot tell if a policy is optimal. Then, there is a constant need to explore new actions instead of exploiting past experience. In practice, it is common to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Lior Shani , Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved impressive performance on complex reasoning tasks by generating detailed chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations. However, these responses are often excessively long, containing redundant reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Chen Huang , Wei Lu , Wenxuan Zhang

Ensuring sufficient exploration is a central challenge when training meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) agents to solve novel environments. Conventional solutions to the exploration-exploitation dilemma inject explicit incentives such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Micah Rentschler , Jesse Roberts

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has prompted increasing interest in their use as in-context learning agents. At the core of agentic behavior is the capacity for exploration, or the ability to actively gather information about the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Nate Rahn , Pierluca D'Oro , Marc G. Bellemare