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Related papers: Outcome-based Exploration for LLM Reasoning

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Scaling test-time computation with reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a reliable path to improve large language models (LLM) reasoning ability. Yet, outcome-based reward often incentivizes models to be overconfident, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Liaoyaqi Wang , Chunsheng Zuo , William Jurayj , Benjamin Van Durme , Anqi Liu

Post-training techniques combined with inference-time scaling significantly enhance the reasoning and alignment capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, a fundamental tension arises: inference-time methods benefit from diverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Changhao Li , Yuchen Zhuang , Chenxiao Gao , Haotian Sun , Rushi Qiang , Chao Zhang , Bo Dai

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

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has advanced LLM reasoning, applying it to long-context scenarios is hindered by sparsity of outcome rewards. This limitation fails to penalize ungrounded "lucky guesses," leaving the critical process of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Xin Guan , Zijian Li , Shen Huang , Pengjun Xie , Jingren Zhou , Jiuxin Cao

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the complex reasoning capabilities of Large Reasoning Models. However, standard outcome-based supervision suffers from a critical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yanwei Ren , Haotian Zhang , Likang Xiao , Xikai Zhang , Jiaxing Huang , Jiayan Qiu , Baosheng Yu , Quan Chen , Liu Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) consistently benefit from scaled Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, but also suffer from heavy computational overhead. To address this issue, efficient reasoning aims to incentivize short yet accurate thinking…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Taiqiang Wu , Zenan Xu , Bo Zhou , Ngai Wong

Large language models are increasingly used for complex reasoning tasks where high-quality offline data such as expert-annotated solutions and distilled reasoning traces are often available. However, in environments with sparse rewards,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Yihao Liu , Shuocheng Li , Lang Cao , Yuhang Xie , Mengyu Zhou , Haoyu Dong , Xiaojun Ma , Shi Han , Dongmei Zhang

Scaling model size and training data has led to great advances in the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the diminishing returns of this approach necessitate alternative methods to improve model capabilities, particularly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Daman Arora , Andrea Zanette

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as evaluators, offering a scalable alternative to human annotation. However, existing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approaches often fall short in domains that demand complex reasoning.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Nuo Chen , Zhiyuan Hu , Qingyun Zou , Jiaying Wu , Qian Wang , Bryan Hooi , Bingsheng He

Large Language Models have demonstrated outstanding performance across various downstream tasks and have been widely applied in multiple scenarios. Human-annotated preference data is used for training to further improve LLMs' performance,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Shimao Zhang , Xiao Liu , Xin Zhang , Junxiao Liu , Zheheng Luo , Shujian Huang , Yeyun Gong

Reinforcement learning has become the central approach for language models (LMs) to learn from environmental reward or feedback. In practice, the environmental feedback is usually sparse and delayed. Learning from such signals is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Taiwei Shi , Sihao Chen , Bowen Jiang , Linxin Song , Longqi Yang , Jieyu Zhao

Language model alignment (or, reinforcement learning) techniques that leverage active exploration -- deliberately encouraging the model to produce diverse, informative responses -- offer the promise of super-human capabilities. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Dylan J. Foster , Zakaria Mhammedi , Dhruv Rohatgi

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in reasoning, exemplified by the success of OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1. However, integrating reasoning with external search processes remains challenging, especially for complex…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) significantly enhances the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), yet applying it to multi-turn agentic tasks remains challenging due to the long-horizon nature of interactions and the stochasticity…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Jingyue Gao , Yanjiang Guo , Xiaoshuai Chen , Jianyu Chen

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective approach for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). The Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) family has demonstrated strong…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Chenxi Liu , Junjie Liang , Yuqi Jia , Bochuan Cao , Yang Bai , Heng Huang , Xun Chen

Protein language models (PLMs) have advanced computational protein science through large-scale pretraining and scalable architectures. In parallel, reinforcement learning (RL) has broadened exploration and enabled precise multi-objective…

Mathematical reasoning is a central challenge for large language models (LLMs), requiring not only correct answers but also faithful reasoning processes. Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Md Tanvirul Alam , Nidhi Rastogi

Model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular learning paradigm due to its potential sample efficiency compared to model-free RL. However, existing empirical model-based RL approaches lack the ability to explore. This work studies a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Yuda Song , Wen Sun

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) enhances the reasoning of large language models (LLMs), but standard RLVR often depends on human-annotated answers or carefully curated reward specifications. In machine-checkable…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Xinjie Chen , Biao Fu , Jing Wu , Guoxin Chen , Xinggao Liu , Dayiheng Liu , Minpeng Liao

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become the de facto standard for tuning LLMs to solve tasks involving reasoning. However, growing evidence shows that models trained in such way often suffer from a significant loss in diversity. We argue…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Germán Kruszewski , Pierre Erbacher , Jos Rozen , Marc Dymetman