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Reinforcement learning (RL) yields substantial improvements in large language models (LLMs) downstream task performance and alignment with human values. Surprisingly, such large gains result from updating only a small subnetwork comprising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Sagnik Mukherjee , Lifan Yuan , Dilek Hakkani-Tur , Hao Peng

Large language models (LLMs) acquire extensive prior knowledge through large-scale pretraining and can be further enhanced via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training. A growing body of evidence has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Honglin Zhang , Qianyue Hao , Fengli Xu , Yong Li

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning has become a crucial step in post-training language models for advanced mathematical reasoning and coding. Following the success of frontier reasoning models, recent work has demonstrated that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Rosie Zhao , Alexandru Meterez , Sham Kakade , Cengiz Pehlevan , Samy Jelassi , Eran Malach

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on massive datasets and later instruction-tuned via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). Best practices emphasize large, diverse pretraining data, whereas post-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Adel Javanmard , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Vahab Mirrokni

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training often improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) beyond the training domain, while supervised fine-tuning (SFT) frequently leads to general capabilities forgetting.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Dan Shi , Zhuowen Han , Simon Ostermann , Renren Jin , Josef van Genabith , Deyi Xiong

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks is an essential stage of modern AI deployment. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as the dominant fine-tuning paradigm, underpinning many state-of-the-art LLMs. In contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Xin Qiu , Yulu Gan , Conor F. Hayes , Qiyao Liang , Yinggan Xu , Roberto Dailey , Elliot Meyerson , Babak Hodjat , Risto Miikkulainen

Pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) exhibits broad capabilities, yet, for specific tasks or domains their attainment of higher accuracy and more reliable reasoning generally depends on post-training through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Haitao Jiang , Wenbo Zhang , Jiarui Yao , Hengrui Cai , Sheng Wang , Rui Song

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Meng Cao , Lei Shu , Lei Yu , Yun Zhu , Nevan Wichers , Yinxiao Liu , Lei Meng

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit substantial performance disparities across languages, particularly between high- and low-resource settings. We propose a framework for improving performance in underrepresented languages while preserving…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Daniil Gurgurov , Tanja Baeumel , Josef van Genabith , Simon Ostermann

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become essential for eliciting complex reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the substantial memory overhead of storing Key-Value (KV) caches during long-horizon rollouts acts as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Sijia Luo , Xiaokang Zhang , Yuxuan Hu , Bohan Zhang , Ke Wang , Jinbo Su , Mengshu Sun , Lei Liang , Jing Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful post-training technique to incentivize the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). However, LLMs can respond very inconsistently to RL finetuning: some show substantial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Zhepeng Cen , Yihang Yao , William Han , Zuxin Liu , Ding Zhao

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

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has significantly improved reasoning in large language models (LLMs), yet the token-level mechanisms underlying these improvements remain unclear. We present a systematic empirical study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Haoming Meng , Kexin Huang , Shaohang Wei , Chiyu Ma , Shuo Yang , Xue Wang , Guoyin Wang , Bolin Ding , Jingren Zhou

The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) suggests that over-parameterized neural networks contain sparse subnetworks ("winning tickets") capable of matching full model performance when trained from scratch. With the growing reliance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Hamed Damirchi , Cristian Rodriguez-Opazo , Ehsan Abbasnejad , Zhen Zhang , Javen Shi

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key technique for enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), with policy-gradient algorithms dominating the post-training stage because of their efficiency and effectiveness.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Chang Tian , Matthew B. Blaschko , Mingzhe Xing , Xiuxing Li , Yinliang Yue , Marie-Francine Moens

In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), alignment has emerged as a fundamental yet challenging problem in the pursuit of more reliable, controllable, and capable machine intelligence. The recent success of reasoning models and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Hao Sun , Mihaela van der Schaar

Automatic code generation has been a longstanding research topic. With the advancement of general-purpose large language models (LLMs), the ability to code stands out as one important measure to the model's reasoning performance. Usually, a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Jie Chen , Xintian Han , Yu Ma , Xun Zhou , Liang Xiang

Reinforcement learning is used to align language models with human preference signals after first pre-training the model to predict the next token of text within a large corpus using likelihood maximization. Before being deployed in a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Alec Solway

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) techniques have yielded impressive reasoning improvements in language models, yet it remains unclear whether post-training truly extends a model's reasoning ability beyond what it acquires during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Charlie Zhang , Graham Neubig , Xiang Yue

Reinforcement learning (RL) enhanced large language models (LLMs), particularly exemplified by DeepSeek-R1, have exhibited outstanding performance. Despite the effectiveness in improving LLM capabilities, its implementation remains highly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Shuhe Wang , Shengyu Zhang , Jie Zhang , Runyi Hu , Xiaoya Li , Tianwei Zhang , Jiwei Li , Fei Wu , Guoyin Wang , Eduard Hovy
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