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Related papers: Mirage or Method? How Model-Task Alignment Induces…

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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

In this work, we review research studies that combine Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Large Language Models (LLMs), two areas that owe their momentum to the development of deep neural networks. We propose a novel taxonomy of three main…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-29 Moschoula Pternea , Prerna Singh , Abir Chakraborty , Yagna Oruganti , Mirco Milletari , Sayli Bapat , Kebei Jiang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently demonstrated notable success in enhancing the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), particularly on mathematics and programming tasks. Similar to how…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Yang Yue , Zhiqi Chen , Rui Lu , Andrew Zhao , Zhaokai Wang , Yang Yue , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in complex reasoning tasks through both post-training and test-time scaling laws. While prevalent test-time scaling approaches are often realized by using external reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Fuxiang Zhang , Jiacheng Xu , Chaojie Wang , Ce Cui , Yang Liu , Bo An

Large language models (LLMs) can transform education, but their optimization for direct question-answering often undermines effective pedagogy which requires strategically withholding answers. To mitigate this, we propose an online…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 David Dinucu-Jianu , Jakub Macina , Nico Daheim , Ido Hakimi , Iryna Gurevych , Mrinmaya Sachan

Large Language Models (LLMs) display strikingly different generalization behaviors: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often narrows capability, whereas reinforcement-learning (RL) tuning tends to preserve it. The reasons behind this divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Haoyue Bai , Yiyou Sun , Wenjie Hu , Shi Qiu , Maggie Ziyu Huan , Peiyang Song , Robert Nowak , Dawn Song

A major challenge of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world applications is the variation between environments, tasks or clients. Meta-RL (MRL) addresses this issue by learning a meta-policy that adapts to new tasks. Standard MRL methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Ido Greenberg , Shie Mannor , Gal Chechik , Eli Meirom

Instruction following aims to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent by specifying explicit constraints on how tasks should be performed. However, we reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon: instruction following can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Yunjia Qi , Hao Peng , Xintong Shi , Amy Xin , Xiaozhi Wang , Bin Xu , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has achieved remarkable success in logical reasoning tasks, yet whether large language model (LLM) alignment requires fundamentally different approaches remains unclear. Given the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Zhaowei Zhang , Xiaohan Liu , Xuekai Zhu , Junchao Huang , Ceyao Zhang , Zhiyuan Feng , Yaodong Yang , Xiaoyuan Yi , Xing Xie

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the active fields in machine learning, demonstrating remarkable potential in tackling real-world challenges. Despite its promising prospects, this methodology has encountered with issues and challenges,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Alireza Rashidi Laleh , Majid Nili Ahmadabadi

The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critically dependent on reward models trained on costly human preference data. While recent work explores bypassing this cost with AI feedback, these methods often lack a rigorous theoretical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Yi-Chen Li , Tian Xu , Yang Yu , Xuqin Zhang , Xiong-Hui Chen , Zhongxiang Ling , Ningjing Chao , Lei Yuan , Zhi-Hua Zhou

As large language models (LLMs) continue to evolve, ensuring their alignment with human goals and values remains a pressing challenge. A key concern is \textit{instrumental convergence}, where an AI system, in optimizing for a given…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Yufei He , Yuexin Li , Jiaying Wu , Yuan Sui , Yulin Chen , Bryan Hooi

The prevailing approach to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on human or AI feedback and assumes access to specific types of preference datasets. In our work, we question the efficacy of such datasets and explore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Hao Sun

In recent years deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems have attained superhuman performance in a number of challenging task domains. However, a major limitation of such applications is their demand for massive amounts of training data. A…

Inductive reasoning is an essential capability for large language models (LLMs) to achieve higher intelligence, which requires the model to generalize rules from observed facts and then apply them to unseen examples. We present MIRAGE, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Jiachun Li , Pengfei Cao , Zhuoran Jin , Yubo Chen , Kang Liu , Jun Zhao

The inherent uncertainty in the environmental transition model of Reinforcement Learning (RL) necessitates a delicate balance between exploration and exploitation. This balance is crucial for optimizing computational resources to accurately…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Yongxin Deng , Xihe Qiu , Jue Chen , Xiaoyu Tan

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) already achieve state-of-the-art results across a wide range of tasks and modalities. To push their reasoning ability further, recent studies explore advanced prompting schemes and post-training…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Zhenyu Pan , Yutong Zhang , Jianshu Zhang , Haoran Lu , Haozheng Luo , Yuwei Han , Philip S. Yu , Manling Li , Han Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome-based rewards has proven effective for improving large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, its success often depends on the base model occasionally sampling correct solutions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jatin Prakash , Anirudh Buvanesh

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

Recent advancements in reasoning-focused language models such as OpenAI's O1 and DeepSeek-R1 have shown that scaling test-time computation-through chain-of-thought reasoning and iterative exploration-can yield substantial improvements on…