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One of the fundamental challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) is the one of data efficiency: modern algorithms require a very large number of training samples, especially compared to humans, for solving environments with high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-10 Hlynur Davíð Hlynsson , Laurenz Wiskott

Large language models (LLMs) are reshaping the recommender system paradigm by enabling users to express preferences and receive recommendations through conversations. Yet, aligning LLMs to the recommendation task remains challenging:…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yaochen Zhu , Harald Steck , Dawen Liang , Yinhan He , Vito Ostuni , Jundong Li , Nathan Kallus

Reinforcement Learning (RL) suffers from sample inefficiency in sparse reward domains, and the problem is further pronounced in case of stochastic transitions. To improve the sample efficiency, reward shaping is a well-studied approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Siddhant Bhambri , Amrita Bhattacharjee , Durgesh Kalwar , Lin Guan , Huan Liu , Subbarao Kambhampati

Previous study suggest that powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) trained with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) only refines reasoning path without improving the reasoning capacity in math tasks while…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Ran Li , Shimin Di , Yuchen Liu , Chen Jing , Yu Qiu , Lei Chen

Reinforcement Learning (RL) models have continually evolved to navigate the exploration - exploitation trade-off in uncertain Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In this study, I leverage the principles of stochastic thermodynamics and system…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Peeyush Kumar

In continuing tasks, average-reward reinforcement learning may be a more appropriate problem formulation than the more common discounted reward formulation. As usual, learning an optimal policy in this setting typically requires a large…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Yuqian Jiang , Sudarshanan Bharadwaj , Bo Wu , Rishi Shah , Ufuk Topcu , Peter Stone

Reward design plays a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, serving as the bridge between feedback signals and model optimization. This survey provides a structured organization of reward modeling and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Miaomiao Ji , Yanqiu Wu , Zhibin Wu , Shoujin Wang , Jian Yang , Mark Dras , Usman Naseem

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a promising policy-based approach for Large Language Model alignment, yet its performance is often limited by training instability and suboptimal convergence. In this paper, we identify and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Marco Simoni , Aleksandar Fontana , Giulio Rossolini , Andrea Saracino , Paolo Mori

Large language models show strong potential for automated code generation, but lack guarantees for correctness, quality, safety, and domain-specific constraints. For instance in robotics, where code generation is increasingly being used for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Erfan Aghadavoodi Jolfaei , Daniel Maninger , Abhinav Anand , Mert Tiftikci , Mira Mezini

Reinforcement learning, such as PPO and GRPO, has powered recent breakthroughs in LLM reasoning. Scaling rollout to sample more prompts enables models to selectively use higher-quality data for training, which can stabilize RL training and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Haizhong Zheng , Yang Zhou , Brian R. Bartoldson , Bhavya Kailkhura , Fan Lai , Jiawei Zhao , Beidi Chen

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an indispensable paradigm for enhancing reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, standard policy optimization methods, such as Group Relative Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Pengyi Li , Elizaveta Goncharova , Andrey Kuznetsov , Ivan Oseledets

We deploy large language models (LLMs) as business development (BD) agents for persuasive price negotiation in online travel agencies (OTAs). The agent must follow a multi-stage Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and strict guardrails (no…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Xia Zeng , Yihan Chen , Luhui Liu , Chao Luo , Ye Chen , Zhuoran Zhuang

Large reasoning models (LRMs) are commonly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to explore long chain-of-thought reasoning, achieving strong performance at high computational cost. Recent methods add multi-reward objectives to jointly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anhao Zhao , Ziyang Chen , Junlong Tong , Yingqi Fan , Fanghua Ye , Shuhao Li , Yunpu Ma , Wenjie Li , Xiaoyu Shen

Evaluating open-ended long-form generation is challenging because it is hard to define what clearly separates good from bad outputs. Existing methods often miss key aspects like coherence, style, or relevance, or are biased by pretraining…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Zongxia Li , Yapei Chang , Yuhang Zhou , Xiyang Wu , Zichao Liang , Yoo Yeon Sung , Jordan Lee Boyd-Graber

Large language models (LLMs) used for multiple-choice and pairwise evaluation tasks often exhibit selection bias due to non-semantic factors like option positions and label symbols. Existing inference-time debiasing is costly and may harm…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Jinquan Zheng , Jia Yuan , Jiacheng Yao , Chenyang Gu , Pujun Zheng , Guoxiu He

Recently, reinforcement learning (RL)-based tuning has shifted the trajectory of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), particularly following the introduction of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). However, directly applying it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Wenhui Zhu , Xuanzhao Dong , Xin Li , Peijie Qiu , Xiwen Chen , Abolfazl Razi , Aris Sotiras , Yi Su , Yalin Wang

Recent work on enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) has introduced explicit length control as a means of constraining computational cost while preserving accuracy. However, existing approaches rely on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud , Kumail Alhamoud , Abed Hammoud , Elie Bou-Zeid , Marzyeh Ghassemi , Bernard Ghanem

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging direct outcome verification instead of learned reward models. Building on this paradigm, Group…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Jingyi Wang , Lei Zhu , Tengjin Weng , Song-Li Wu , Haochen Tan , Jierun Chen , Chaofan Tao , Haoli Bai , Lu Hou , Lifeng Shang , Xiao-Ping Zhang

This paper provides a self-contained, from-scratch, exposition of key algorithms for instruction tuning of models: SFT, Rejection Sampling, REINFORCE, Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), Group…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Rohit Patel

Diffusion-based large language models offer a non-autoregressive alternative for text generation, but enabling them to perform complex reasoning remains challenging. Reinforcement learning has recently emerged as an effective post-training…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Shaoan Xie , Lingjing Kong , Xiangchen Song , Xinshuai Dong , Guangyi Chen , Eric P. Xing , Kun Zhang