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Large language models (LLMs) typically receive diverse natural language (NL) feedback through interaction with the environment. However, current reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms rely solely on scalar rewards, leaving the rich…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Lei Huang , Xiang Cheng , Chenxiao Zhao , Guobin Shen , Junjie Yang , Xiaocheng Feng , Yuxuan Gu , Xing Yu , Bing Qin

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a transformative approach for aligning and enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs), addressing critical challenges in instruction following, ethical alignment, and reasoning capabilities. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Saksham Sahai Srivastava , Vaneet Aggarwal

The central tenet of reinforcement learning (RL) is that agents seek to maximize the sum of cumulative rewards. In contrast, active inference, an emerging framework within cognitive and computational neuroscience, proposes that agents act…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Alexander Tschantz , Beren Millidge , Anil K. Seth , Christopher L. Buckley

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning motivates agents to explore states and actions to maximize the entropy of some distribution, typically by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to that entropy function. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

Exploration has been a crucial part of reinforcement learning, yet several important questions concerning exploration efficiency are still not answered satisfactorily by existing analytical frameworks. These questions include exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-06 Liangpeng Zhang , Ke Tang , Xin Yao

Recent advancements in large reasoning models (LRMs) have significantly enhanced language models' capabilities in complex problem-solving by emulating human-like deliberative thinking. However, these models often exhibit overthinking (i.e.,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Weixiang Zhao , Jiahe Guo , Yang Deng , Xingyu Sui , Yulin Hu , Yanyan Zhao , Wanxiang Che , Bing Qin , Tat-Seng Chua , Ting Liu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a key approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, prevalent RL approaches like proximal policy optimization and group relative policy optimization suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jingtong Gao , Ling Pan , Yejing Wang , Rui Zhong , Chi Lu , Maolin Wang , Qingpeng Cai , Peng Jiang , Xiangyu Zhao

Training LLM agents in multi-turn environments with sparse rewards, where completing a single task requires 30+ turns of interaction within an episode, presents a fundamental challenge for reinforcement learning. We identify a critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Wujiang Xu , Wentian Zhao , Zhenting Wang , Yu-Jhe Li , Can Jin , Mingyu Jin , Kai Mei , Kun Wan , Dimitris N. Metaxas

One of the most critical challenges in deep reinforcement learning is to maintain the long-term exploration capability of the agent. To tackle this problem, it has been recently proposed to provide intrinsic rewards for the agent to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Mingqi Yuan , Man-on Pun , Dong Wang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has substantially empowered Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex reasoning tasks, yet the verbose nature of explicit reasoning steps incurs prohibitive inference latency and computational costs, limiting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Qin-Wen Luo , Sheng Ren , Xiang Chen , Rui Liu , Jun Fang , Naiqiang Tan , Sheng-Jun Huang

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has significantly boosted the reasoning capability of language models (LMs). However, existing RLVR approaches train LMs based on their own on-policy responses and are constrained by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Chenming Tang , Hsiu-Yuan Huang , Weijie Liu , Clive Bai , Saiyong Yang , Yunfang Wu

In order to compute near-optimal policies with policy-gradient algorithms, it is common in practice to include intrinsic exploration terms in the learning objective. Although the effectiveness of these terms is usually justified by an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

Entropy-based deep reasoning has emerged as a promising direction for improving the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), but existing methods often either increase response length indiscriminately or shorten responses at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Shuyu Wei , Jian Sun , Delai Qiu , Yining Wang , Shengping Liu , Jiaen Liang , Ying Fu , Wei Huang , Jitao Sang

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has recently enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly for mathematical problem solving. However, a fundamental limitation remains: as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Wenhao Deng , Long Wei , Chenglei Yu , Tailin Wu

Despite their success in many domains, large language models (LLMs) remain under-studied in scenarios requiring optimal decision-making under uncertainty. This is crucial as many real-world applications, ranging from personalized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Allen Nie , Yi Su , Bo Chang , Jonathan N. Lee , Ed H. Chi , Quoc V. Le , Minmin Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning abilities through test-time computation (TTC) techniques such as chain-of-thought prompting and tree-based reasoning. However, we argue that current reasoning LLMs (RLLMs)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Jiahao Lu , Ziwei Xu , Mohan Kankanhalli

Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have been demonstrated to possess intrinsic reasoning capabilities that can emerge naturally when expanding the response space. However, the neural representation mechanisms underlying these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-10 Zijian Wang , Chang Xu

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are Large Language Models (LLMs) explicitly trained to generate long-form Chain-of-Thoughts (CoTs), achieving impressive success on challenging tasks like math and programming. However, their underlying…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is emerging as a powerful paradigm for enabling large language models (LLMs) to perform complex reasoning tasks. Recent advances indicate that integrating RL with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) allows LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Wentao Jiang , Xiang Feng , Zengmao Wang , Yong Luo , Pingbo Xu , Zhe Chen , Bo Du , Jing Zhang

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) significantly improve the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) by learning to reason, exhibiting promising performance in solving complex tasks. However, their deliberative reasoning process leads…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Yue Liu , Jiaying Wu , Yufei He , Ruihan Gong , Jun Xia , Liang Li , Hongcheng Gao , Hongyu Chen , Baolong Bi , Jiaheng Zhang , Zhiqi Huang , Bryan Hooi , Stan Z. Li , Keqin Li