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Related papers: Variational Reasoning for Language Models

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How should future neural reasoning systems implement extended computation? Recursive Reasoning Models (RRMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive sequence extension by performing iterative latent-state refinement with shared…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Junyeob Baek , Mingyu Jo , Minsu Kim , Mengye Ren , Yoshua Bengio , Sungjin Ahn

Policy-based reinforcement learning currently plays an important role in improving LLMs on mathematical reasoning tasks. However, existing rollout-based reinforcement learning methods (GRPO, DAPO, GSPO, etc.) fail to explicitly consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Guochao Jiang , Wenfeng Feng , Guofeng Quan , Chuzhan Hao , Yuewei Zhang , Guohua Liu , Hao Wang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), primarily driven by the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm, is a leading approach for enhancing the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Kangqi Ni , Zhen Tan , Zijie Liu , Pingzhi Li , Tianlong Chen

Variational inference is a very efficient and popular heuristic used in various forms in the context of latent variable models. It's closely related to Expectation Maximization (EM), and is applied when exact EM is computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-08-25 Pranjal Awasthi , Andrej Risteski

We explore the performance of latent variable models for conditional text generation in the context of neural machine translation (NMT). Similar to Zhang et al., we augment the encoder-decoder NMT paradigm by introducing a continuous latent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-12-12 Artidoro Pagnoni , Kevin Liu , Shangyan Li

Generating accurate and executable code using Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge for underrepresented programming languages, such as Prolog and Lisp, due to the scarcity of public training data compared to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Federico Pennino , Bianca Raimondi , Massimo Rondelli , Andrea Gurioli , Maurizio Gabbrielli

The enhancement of reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs) has garnered significant attention, with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning emerging as dominant paradigms. While recent studies recognize the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Zhijie Wang

Test-time scaling has proven effective in further enhancing the performance of pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs). However, mainstream post-training methods (i.e., reinforcement learning (RL) with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Yuyang Xu , Yi Cheng , Haochao Ying , Zhuoyun Du , Renjun Hu , Xing Shi , Wei Lin , Jian Wu

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning have been hindered by a persistent challenge: exploration collapse. The semantic homogeneity of random rollouts often traps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Huilin Deng , Hongchen Luo , Yue Zhu , Long Li , Zhuoyue Chen , Xinghao Zhao , Ming Li , Jihai Zhang , Mengchang Wang , Yang Cao , Yu Kang

Randomly masking and predicting word tokens has been a successful approach in pre-training language models for a variety of downstream tasks. In this work, we observe that the same idea also applies naturally to sequential decision making,…

Latent reasoning represents a new development in Transformer language models that has shown potential in compressing reasoning lengths compared to chain-of-thought reasoning. By directly passing the information-rich previous final latent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Alex Ning , Yen-Ling Kuo , Gabe Gomes

Existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods for large language models have advanced rapidly, yet their design has largely been guided by heuristics rather than systematic theoretical principles. This gap limits our…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-16 Zixun Huang , Jiayi Sheng , Zeyu Zheng

Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in effectively leveraging sequential environmental feedback (EF) signals, such as natural language evaluations, for feedback-independent chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. Existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Kang Yang , Jingxue Chen , Qingkun Tang , Tianxiang Zhang , Qianchun Lu

We propose to scale RL to unverifiable data with a novel algorithm JEPO (Jensen's Evidence lower bound Policy Optimization). While most prior efforts on scaling RL for LLMs focus on verifiable data where ground truth answers are typically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Yunhao Tang , Sid Wang , Lovish Madaan , Rémi Munos

Advances in variational inference enable parameterisation of probabilistic models by deep neural networks. This combines the statistical transparency of the probabilistic modelling framework with the representational power of deep learning.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Tom Pelsmaeker , Wilker Aziz

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse tasks. However, concerns about their trustworthiness persist, particularly regarding tendencies to lean more on textual cues than visual evidence and the risk of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Shizhan Gong , Minda Hu , Qiyuan Zhang , Chen Ma , Qi Dou

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a key method for improving Large Language Models' reasoning capabilities, yet recent evidence suggests it may paradoxically shrink the reasoning boundary rather than…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Phuc Minh Nguyen , Chinh D. La , Duy M. H. Nguyen , Nitesh V. Chawla , Binh T. Nguyen , Khoa D. Doan

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) significantly enhances the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), explicit reasoning chains introduce substantial computational redundancy. Recent latent reasoning methods attempt to mitigate this by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Fanmeng Wang , Haotian Liu , Guojiang Zhao , Hongteng Xu , Zhifeng Gao

When trained effectively, the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is both a powerful language model and an effective representation learning framework. In practice, however, VAEs are trained with the evidence lower bound (ELBO) as a surrogate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-04 Bohan Li , Junxian He , Graham Neubig , Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick , Yiming Yang

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