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While Long Chain-of-Thought (Long CoT) reasoning has shown promise in Large Language Models (LLMs), its adoption for enhancing recommendation quality is growing rapidly. In this work, we critically examine this trend and argue that Long CoT…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Hongxun Ding , Keqin Bao , Jizhi Zhang , Yi Fang , Wenxin Xu , Fuli Feng , Xiangnan He

In distributed optimization, the practical problem-solving performance is essentially sensitive to algorithm selection, parameter setting, problem type and data pattern. Thus, it is often laborious to acquire a highly efficient method for a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-04 Daokuan Zhu , Tianqi Xu , Jie Lu

Continual learning is a promising machine learning paradigm to learn new tasks while retaining previously learned knowledge over streaming training data. Till now, rehearsal-based methods, keeping a small part of data from old tasks as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-04 Quanziang Wang , Renzhen Wang , Yuexiang Li , Dong Wei , Kai Ma , Yefeng Zheng , Deyu Meng

Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks significantly, but finetuning PLMs on low-resource datasets poses significant challenges such as instability and overfitting. Previous methods tackle…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-20 Sai Ashish Somayajula , Youwei Liang , Abhishek Singh , Li Zhang , Pengtao Xie

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is critical for real-world deployment, yet existing methods like RLHF face computational and stability challenges. While DPO establishes an offline paradigm with single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Junkang Wu , Kexin Huang , Xue Wang , Jinyang Gao , Bolin Ding , Jiancan Wu , Xiangnan He , Xiang Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Penghui Qi , Xiangxin Zhou , Zichen Liu , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Min Lin , Wee Sun Lee

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

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

Offline imitation learning (offline IL) enables training effective policies without requiring explicit reward annotations. Recent approaches attempt to estimate rewards for unlabeled datasets using a small set of expert demonstrations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Shengjie Sun , Jiafei Lyu , Runze Liu , Mengbei Yan , Bo Liu , Deheng Ye , Xiu Li

Recent progress in Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning is increasingly driven by the refinement of post-training loss functions and alignment strategies. However, standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigms like Group Relative Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Kishan Panaganti , Zhenwen Liang , Wenhao Yu , Haitao Mi , Dong Yu

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

Supervised fine-tuning is the most common method to adapt large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, but full fine-tuning LLMs requires massive computational resources. Recently, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Xiangdi Meng , Damai Dai , Weiyao Luo , Zhe Yang , Shaoxiang Wu , Xiaochen Wang , Peiyi Wang , Qingxiu Dong , Liang Chen , Zhifang Sui

The rapid development of large language model (LLM) alignment algorithms has resulted in a complex and fragmented landscape, with limited clarity on the effectiveness of different methods and their inter-connections. This paper introduces…

Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently use on-policy algorithms, such as PPO or GRPO. However, policy lag from distributed training architectures and differences between the training and inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Daniel Ritter , Owen Oertell , Bradley Guo , Jonathan Chang , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a lightweight variant of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Chen Wang , Lai Wei , Yanzhi Zhang , Chenyang Shao , Zedong Dan , Weiran Huang , Yuzhi Zhang , Yue Wang

Large language models (LLMs) trained on webscale data can produce toxic outputs, raising concerns for safe deployment. Prior defenses, based on applications of DPO, NPO, and similar algorithms, reduce the likelihood of harmful…

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) faces challenges in evaluating policy trajectories within intricate game tasks due to the difficulty in designing comprehensive and precise reward functions. This inherent difficulty curtails the broader…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Zichao Shen , Tianchen Zhu , Qingyun Sun , Shiqi Gao , Jianxin Li

Preference alignment is a critical step in making Large Language Models (LLMs) useful and aligned with (human) preferences. Existing approaches such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback or Direct Preference Optimization typically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Lucio La Cava , Andrea Tagarelli

While reinforcement learning (RL) methods that learn an internal model of the environment have the potential to be more sample efficient than their model-free counterparts, learning to model raw observations from high dimensional sensors…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Raj Ghugare , Homanga Bharadhwaj , Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov