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

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Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a key paradigm for aligning and optimizing large language models (LLMs). Standard approaches treat the LLM as the policy and apply RL directly over the full vocabulary space. However, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Jing-Cheng Pang , Liang Lu , Xian Tang , Kun Jiang , Sijie Wu , Kai Zhang , Xubin Li

Alignment of large language models (LLMs) typically involves training a reward model on preference data, followed by policy optimization with respect to the reward model. However, optimizing policies with respect to a single reward model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Debangshu Banerjee , Kintan Saha , Aditya Gopalan

Although deep reinforcement learning has recently been very successful at learning complex behaviors, it requires a tremendous amount of data to learn a task. One of the fundamental reasons causing this limitation lies in the nature of the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Zhenshan Bing , Alexander Koch , Xiangtong Yao , Kai Huang , Alois Knoll

Large language models (LLMs) are incredible and versatile tools for text-based tasks that have enabled countless, previously unimaginable, applications. Retrieval models, in contrast, have not yet seen such capable general-purpose models…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Julian Killingback , Hamed Zamani

Many applications of large language models (LLMs) require deductive reasoning, yet models frequently produce incorrect or redundant inference steps. We frame natural language inference as a search problem where the final answer is the valid…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Andreas Opedal , Francesco Ignazio Re , Abulhair Saparov , Mrinmaya Sachan , Bernhard Schölkopf , Ryan Cotterell

Many evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) target tasks that are inherently ill-defined, with unclear input and output spaces and ambiguous success criteria. We analyze why existing evaluation benchmarks and metrics fail to provide…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Yi Zhou , Basel Shbita

We prove a fundamental limitation on the efficiency of a wide class of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. This limitation applies to model-free RL methods as well as a broad range of model-based methods, such as planning with tree…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-29 Brieuc Pinon , Raphaël Jungers , Jean-Charles Delvenne

Work on scaling laws has found that large language models (LMs) show predictable improvements to overall loss with increased scale (model size, training data, and compute). Here, we present evidence for the claim that LMs may show inverse…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language tasks, but their safety and morality remain contentious due to their training on internet text corpora. To address these concerns, alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Mohammad Bahrami Karkevandi , Nishant Vishwamitra , Peyman Najafirad

The availability of large pre-trained models is changing the landscape of Machine Learning research and practice, moving from a training-from-scratch to a fine-tuning paradigm. While in some applications the goal is to "nudge" the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Tomasz Korbak , Hady Elsahar , Germán Kruszewski , Marc Dymetman

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed with hierarchical instruction schemes, where certain instructions (e.g., system-level directives) are expected to take precedence over others (e.g., user messages). Yet, we lack a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Yilin Geng , Haonan Li , Honglin Mu , Xudong Han , Timothy Baldwin , Omri Abend , Eduard Hovy , Lea Frermann

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in real-world decision-making across diverse domains, including gaming, robotics, online advertising, public health, and natural language processing. Despite these advances, a…

Applications · Statistics 2026-01-23 Asim H. Gazi , Yongyi Guo , Daiqi Gao , Ziping Xu , Kelly W. Zhang , Susan A. Murphy

The last decade has seen an upswing in interest and adoption of reinforcement learning (RL) techniques, in large part due to its demonstrated capabilities at performing certain tasks at "super-human levels". This has incentivized the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Pablo Samuel Castro

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities for reinforcement learning (RL) models, such as planning and reasoning capabilities. However, the problems of LLMs and RL model collaboration still need to be solved. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Shangding Gu

To combat the misuse of Large Language Models (LLMs), many recent studies have presented LLM-generated-text detectors with promising performance. When users instruct LLMs to generate texts, the instruction can include different constraints…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-02 Ryuto Koike , Masahiro Kaneko , Naoaki Okazaki

While reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved notable success in various domains, training effective policies for complex tasks remains challenging. Agents often converge to local optima and fail to maximize long-term rewards. Existing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Heng Tan , Hua Yan , Yu Yang

Reasoning has emerged as the next major frontier for language models (LMs), with rapid advances from both academic and industrial labs. However, this progress often outpaces methodological rigor, with many evaluations relying on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Andreas Hochlehnert , Hardik Bhatnagar , Vishaal Udandarao , Samuel Albanie , Ameya Prabhu , Matthias Bethge

Large language models (LLMs) could be valuable personal AI agents across various domains, provided they can precisely follow user instructions. However, recent studies have shown significant limitations in LLMs' instruction-following…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Juyeon Heo , Miao Xiong , Christina Heinze-Deml , Jaya Narain

Techniques that learn improved representations via offline data or self-supervised objectives have shown impressive results in traditional reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, it is unclear how improved representation learning can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Vaskar Nath , Dylan Slack , Jeff Da , Yuntao Ma , Hugh Zhang , Spencer Whitehead , Sean Hendryx

Large language models (LLMs) have shown significant progress in reasoning tasks. However, recent studies show that transformers and LLMs fail catastrophically once reasoning problems exceed modest complexity. We revisit these findings…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Revanth Rameshkumar , Jimson Huang , Yunxin Sun , Fei Xia , Abulhair Saparov