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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

Large language models (LLMs) trained via pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can still produce harmful and misaligned outputs, or struggle in domains like math and coding. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhichao Wang , Kiran Ramnath , Bin Bi , Shiva Kumar Pentyala , Sougata Chaudhuri , Shubham Mehrotra , Zixu , Zhu , Xiang-Bo Mao , Sitaram Asur , Na , Cheng

Diffusion policies have achieved superior performance in imitation learning and offline reinforcement learning (RL) due to their rich expressiveness. However, the conventional diffusion training procedure requires samples from target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Haitong Ma , Tianyi Chen , Kai Wang , Na Li , Bo Dai

Recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) demonstrate that sophisticated behaviors such as multi-step reasoning and self-reflection can emerge via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards~(\textit{RLVR}). However, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Jianhao Yan , Yafu Li , Zican Hu , Zhi Wang , Ganqu Cui , Xiaoye Qu , Yu Cheng , Yue Zhang

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has been a key driver of recent progress in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models, but it is typically trained in a low-staleness, near-on-policy regime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Minghao Tian , Yunfei Xie , Chen Wei

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for improving the reasoning capabilities of language models (LMs) in domains such as mathematics and coding. However, most modern RL algorithms were designed to target robotics…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Lianghuan Huang , Shuo Li , Sagnik Anupam , Insup Lee , Osbert Bastani

Adapting language models (LMs) to new tasks via post-training carries the risk of degrading existing capabilities -- a phenomenon classically known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, toward identifying guidelines for mitigating this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Howard Chen , Noam Razin , Karthik Narasimhan , Danqi Chen

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) looks at learning how to optimally solve tasks using a fixed dataset of interactions from the environment. Many off-policy algorithms developed for online learning struggle in the offline setting as they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Natinael Solomon Neggatu , Jeremie Houssineau , Giovanni Montana

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has played a central role in the recent surge of LLMs' math abilities by enabling self-improvement through binary verifier signals. In contrast, Supervised Learning (SL) is rarely considered for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Huayu Chen , Kaiwen Zheng , Qinsheng Zhang , Ganqu Cui , Lifan Yuan , Yin Cui , Haotian Ye , Tsung-Yi Lin , Ming-Yu Liu , Jun Zhu , Haoxiang Wang

Standard human preference-based alignment methods, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), are a cornerstone for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, these methods typically assume that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Xiaoyang Cao , Zelai Xu , Mo Guang , Kaiwen Long , Michiel A. Bakker , Yu Wang , Chao Yu

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

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), encounter the challenge of distribution shift. Current approaches typically address this issue…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Qiyuan Deng , Xuefeng Bai , Kehai Chen , Yaowei Wang , Liqiang Nie , Min Zhang

Off-policy updates are inevitable in reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) due to rollout staleness from asynchronous training and mismatches between training and inference engines. Naive importance sampling gives an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Guobin Shen , Chenxiao Zhao , Xiang Cheng , Lei Huang , Xing Yu

Training agents via off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) requires a large memory, named replay memory, that stores past experiences used for learning. These experiences are sampled, uniformly or non-uniformly, to create the batches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-27 Bumgeun Park , Taeyoung Kim , Woohyeon Moon , Luiz Felipe Vecchietti , Dongsoo Har

Recent mixed-policy optimization methods for LLM reasoning that interleave or blend supervised and reinforcement learning signals report improvements over the standard SFT-then-RL pipeline. We show that numerous recently published research…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Alexis Limozin , Eduard Durech , Torsten Hoefler , Imanol Schlag , Valentina Pyatkin

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have substantially improved the training of large-scale language models, leading to significant gains in generation quality and reasoning ability. However, most existing research focuses on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Di Zhang , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Lingjie Jiang , Yaru Hao , Li Dong , Zewen Chi , Zhifang Sui , Furu Wei

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) allows us to train models, such as language models (LMs), to follow complex human preferences. In RLHF for LMs, we first train an LM using supervised fine-tuning, sample pairs of responses,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Johannes Ackermann , Takashi Ishida , Masashi Sugiyama

Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Daoming Lyu , Qi Qi , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Hengshuai Yao , Tianbao Yang , Bo Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong reasoning abilities, often amplified by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and reinforcement learning (RL). Although RL algorithms can substantially improve reasoning, they struggle to expand reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Xiangchi Yuan , Xiang Chen , Tong Yu , Dachuan Shi , Can Jin , Wenke Lee , Saayan Mitra

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal