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Scaling test-time compute has emerged as a powerful mechanism for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) performance. However, standard post-training paradigms, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), optimize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Adam Ousherovitch , Ambuj Tewari

Large language models excel at short-horizon reasoning tasks, but performance drops as reasoning horizon lengths increase. Existing approaches to combat this rely on inference-time scaffolding or costly step-level supervision, neither of…

Reinforcement learning has proven effective for enhancing multi-step reasoning in large language models (LLMs), yet its benefits have not fully translated to multilingual contexts. Existing methods struggle with a fundamental trade-off:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Yuchun Fan , Bei Li , Peiguang Li , Yilin Wang , Yongyu Mu , Jian Yang , Xin Chen , Rongxiang Weng , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai , Jingbo Zhu , Tong Xiao

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for reasoning tasks using reinforcement learning methods like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is computationally expensive. To address this, we propose a predictive framework that models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Datta Nimmaturi , Vaishnavi Bhargava , Rajat Ghosh , Johnu George , Debojyoti Dutta

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

The reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) can be unleashed with reinforcement learning (RL) (OpenAI, 2024; DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025a; Zeng et al., 2025). The success of existing RL attempts in LLMs usually rely on high-quality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Yiyuan Li , Zhen Huang , Yanan Wu , Weixun Wang , Xuefeng Li , Yijia Luo , Wenbo Su , Bo Zheng , Pengfei Liu

While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards has enhanced the reasoning of large-scale language models (LLMs), its efficacy for lightweight multimodal language models (MLLMs) with fewer than seven billion parameters remains…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Linyu Ou , YuYang Yin

Recent advances in reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are largely driven by reinforcement learning (RL), yet the underlying parameter dynamics during RL training remain poorly understood. This work identifies two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yuchen Cai , Ding Cao , Xin Xu , Zijun Yao , Yuqing Huang , Zhenyu Tan , Benyi Zhang , Guangzhong Sun , Guiquan Liu , Junfeng Fang

Post-training algorithms such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) are widely used to adapt (multimodal) large language models to downstream tasks. While effective at task adaptation, their impact on retaining…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Zhihao Zhang , Qiaole Dong , Qi Zhang , Jun Zhao , Enyu Zhou , Zhiheng Xi , Senjie Jin , Xiaoran Fan , Yuhao Zhou , Mingqi Wu , Yanwei Fu , Tao Ji , Tao Gui , Xuanjing Huang , Kai Chen

Test-time scaling improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by allocating extra compute to generate longer Chains-of-Thoughts (CoTs). This enables models to tackle more complex problem by breaking them down into…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Adel Javanmard , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Vahab Mirrokni

Test-time scaling, which leverages additional computation during inference to improve model accuracy, has enabled a new class of Large Language Models (LLMs) that are able to reason through complex problems by understanding the goal,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Shaltiel Shmidman , Asher Fredman , Oleg Sudakov , Meriem Bendris

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success on reasoning benchmarks through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), excelling at tasks such as math, coding, logic, and puzzles. However, existing benchmarks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Xiaozhe Li , Xinyu Fang , Shengyuan Ding , Yang Li , Linyang Li , Haodong Duan , Qingwen Liu , Kai Chen

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a near-optimal policy using pre-collected datasets. In real-world scenarios, data collection could be costly and risky; therefore, offline RL becomes particularly challenging when the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Ruizhe Shi , Yuyao Liu , Yanjie Ze , Simon S. Du , Huazhe Xu

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have significantly advanced performance on complex tasks, yet their tendency to overthink introduces inefficiencies. This study investigates the internal mechanisms of reinforcement learning (RL)-trained LRMs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Rongzhi Zhu , Yi Liu , Zequn Sun , Yiwei Wang , Wei Hu

Looped Language Models (LoopLMs) perform multi-step latent reasoning prior to token generation and outperform conventional LLMs on reasoning benchmarks at smaller parameter budgets. However, attempts to further improve LoopLM reasoning with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jonathan Williams , Esin Tureci

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have substantially enhanced the planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the theoretical basis for their effectiveness remains elusive. In this work, we investigate RL's benefits…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Siwei Wang , Yifei Shen , Haoran Sun , Shi Feng , Shang-Hua Teng , Li Dong , Yaru Hao , Wei Chen

Recent advances in reasoning domains with neural networks have primarily been enabled by a training recipe that optimizes Large Language Models, previously trained to predict the next-token in a sequence, with reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Nikolaos Tsilivis , Eran Malach , Karen Ullrich , Julia Kempe

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in mathematical reasoning has become a cornerstone of related research, demonstrating the intelligence of these models and enabling potential practical applications through their advanced performance,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-20 Kathrin Seßler , Yao Rong , Emek Gözlüklü , Enkelejda Kasneci

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with computational efficiency and error propagation in multi-step reasoning tasks. While recent advancements on prompting and post-training have enabled LLMs to perform step-wise reasoning, they…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yuan Sui , Yufei He , Tri Cao , Simeng Han , Yulin Chen , Bryan Hooi

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in reasoning, exemplified by the success of OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1. However, integrating reasoning with external search processes remains challenging, especially for complex…