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Parameter-Efficient finetuning (PEFT) enhances model performance on downstream tasks by updating a minimal subset of parameters. Representation finetuning (ReFT) methods further improve efficiency by freezing model weights and optimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Sirui Liang , Pengfei Cao , Jian Zhao , Cong Huang , Jun Zhao , Kang Liu

Reinforcement finetuning (RFT) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for unlocking reasoning capabilities in large language models. However, we identify a critical trade-off: while unconstrained RFT achieves strong reasoning performance, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Shuozhe Li , Jincheng Cao , Bodun Hu , Aryan Mokhtari , Leqi Liu , Amy Zhang

Image-based reinforcement learning (RL) faces significant challenges in generalization when the visual environment undergoes substantial changes between training and deployment. Under such circumstances, learned policies may not perform…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Weiyao Wang , Xinyuan Fang , Gregory D. Hager

Typical reinforcement learning (RL) methods for LLM reasoning waste compute on hard problems, where correct on-policy traces are rare, policy gradients vanish, and learning stalls. To bootstrap more efficient RL, we consider reusing old…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Amrith Setlur , Zijian Wang , Andrew Cohen , Paria Rashidinejad , Sang Michael Xie

Reinforcement learning (RL) for mathematical reasoning can suffer from reward sparsity: for challenging problems, LLM fails to sample any correct trajectories, preventing RL from receiving meaningful positive feedback. At the same time,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Yangzhen Wu , Shanda Li , Zixin Wen , Xin Zhou , Ameet Talwalkar , Yiming Yang , Wenhao Huang , Tianle Cai

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically fine-tuned for reasoning tasks through a two-stage pipeline of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL), a process fraught with catastrophic forgetting and suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Lixuan He , Jie Feng , Yong Li

Recently, foundation models such as OpenAI's O1 and O3, along with DeepSeek's R1, have demonstrated strong reasoning capacities and problem-solving skills acquired through large-scale reinforcement learning (RL), with wide applications in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Tianbing Xu

Existing LLMs-post-training techniques are broadly categorized into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). Each paradigm presents a distinct trade-off: (1) SFT excels at mimicking demonstration data, but can lead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Zeyu Huang , Tianhao Cheng , Zihan Qiu , Zili Wang , Yinghui Xu , Edoardo M. Ponti , Ivan Titov

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

Fine-tuning foundation models has emerged as a powerful approach for generating objects with specific desired properties. Reinforcement learning (RL) provides an effective framework for this purpose, enabling models to generate outputs that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Pouya M. Ghari , Simone Sciabola , Ye Wang

While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Rejection Sampling Fine-Tuning (RFT) are standard for LLM alignment, they either rely on costly expert data or discard valuable negative samples, leading to data inefficiency. To address this, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Zehua Liu , Shuqi Liu , Tao Zhong , Mingxuan Yuan

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs). Off-policy methods offer greater implementation simplicity and data efficiency than on-policy techniques, but often result in suboptimal performance. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Charles Arnal , Gaëtan Narozniak , Vivien Cabannes , Yunhao Tang , Julia Kempe , Remi Munos

Large language models (LLMs) excel in tasks like question answering and dialogue, but complex tasks requiring interaction, such as negotiation and persuasion, require additional long-horizon reasoning and planning. Reinforcement learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Joey Hong , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine

Generative foundation models are susceptible to implicit biases that can arise from extensive unsupervised training data. Such biases can produce suboptimal samples, skewed outcomes, and unfairness, with potentially serious consequences.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-04 Hanze Dong , Wei Xiong , Deepanshu Goyal , Yihan Zhang , Winnie Chow , Rui Pan , Shizhe Diao , Jipeng Zhang , Kashun Shum , Tong Zhang

Language models trained with reinforcement learning (RL) can engage in reward hacking--the exploitation of unintended strategies for high reward--without revealing this behavior in their chain-of-thought reasoning. This makes the detection…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Miles Turpin , Andy Arditi , Marvin Li , Joe Benton , Julian Michael

Pretrained language models are commonly aligned with human preferences and downstream tasks via reinforcement finetuning (RFT), which refers to maximizing a (possibly learned) reward function using policy gradient algorithms. This work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Noam Razin , Hattie Zhou , Omid Saremi , Vimal Thilak , Arwen Bradley , Preetum Nakkiran , Joshua Susskind , Etai Littwin

From a first-principles perspective, it may seem odd that the strongest results in foundation model fine-tuning (FT) are achieved via a relatively complex, two-stage training procedure. Specifically, one first trains a reward model (RM) on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Gokul Swamy , Sanjiban Choudhury , Wen Sun , Zhiwei Steven Wu , J. Andrew Bagnell

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

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently emerged as a promising framework for improving reasoning abilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, policy optimized with binary verification prone to overlook…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Jinghao Zhang , Naishan Zheng , Ruilin Li , Dongzhou Cheng , Zheming Liang , Feng Zhao , Jiaqi Wang