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Reinforcement learning (RL) has increasingly become a pivotal technique in the post-training of large language models (LLMs). The effective exploration of the output space is essential for the success of RL. We observe that for complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Shihan Dou , Muling Wu , Jingwen Xu , Rui Zheng , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Trustworthy verifiers are essential for the success of reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR), which is the core methodology behind various large reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1. In complex domains like mathematical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Yuzhen Huang , Weihao Zeng , Xingshan Zeng , Qi Zhu , Junxian He

Alignment is vital for safely deploying large language models (LLMs). Existing techniques are either reward-based (training a reward model on preference pairs and optimizing with reinforcement learning) or reward-free (directly fine-tuning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ruoxi Cheng , Haoxuan Ma , Weixin Wang , Ranjie Duan , Jiexi Liu , Xiaoshuang Jia , Simeng Qin , Xiaochun Cao , Yang Liu , Xiaojun Jia

Using learned reward functions (LRFs) as a means to solve sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) tasks has yielded some steady progress in task-complexity through the years. In this work, we question whether today's LRFs are best-suited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-24 Ademi Adeniji , Amber Xie , Carmelo Sferrazza , Younggyo Seo , Stephen James , Pieter Abbeel

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences usually requires fine-tuning methods such as RLHF and DPO. These methods directly optimize the model parameters, so they cannot be used in test-time to improve model performance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Xinnan Zhang , Chenliang Li , Siliang Zeng , Jiaxiang Li , Zhongruo Wang , Kaixiang Lin , Songtao Lu , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has shown promise in enhancing the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by increasing test-time compute. However, even after extensive RLVR training, such models still…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Pinzheng Wang , Shuli Xu , Juntao Li , Yu Luo , Dong Li , Jianye Hao , Min Zhang

Recent advances in reasoning-centric language models have highlighted reinforcement learning (RL) as a promising method for aligning models with verifiable rewards. However, it remains contentious whether RL truly expands a model's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Mingjie Liu , Shizhe Diao , Ximing Lu , Jian Hu , Xin Dong , Yejin Choi , Jan Kautz , Yi Dong

As a paradigm for sequential decision making in unknown environments, reinforcement learning (RL) has received a flurry of attention in recent years. However, the explosion of model complexity in emerging applications and the presence of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-22 Yuejie Chi , Yuxin Chen , Yuting Wei

When language models (LMs) are trained via reinforcement learning (RL) to generate natural language "reasoning chains", their performance improves on a variety of difficult question answering tasks. Today, almost all successful applications…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Mehul Damani , Isha Puri , Stewart Slocum , Idan Shenfeld , Leshem Choshen , Yoon Kim , Jacob Andreas

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on reasoning benchmarks via reinforcement learning requires a specific reward function, often binary, for each benchmark. This comes with two potential limitations: the need to design the reward, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Ariel Kwiatkowski , Natasha Butt , Ismail Labiad , Julia Kempe , Yann Ollivier

Achieving the effective design and improvement of reward functions in reinforcement learning (RL) tasks with complex custom environments and multiple requirements presents considerable challenges. In this paper, we propose ERFSL, an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Guanwen Xie , Jingzehua Xu , Yiyuan Yang , Yimian Ding , Shuai Zhang

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a promising approach for training language models (LMs) on reasoning tasks that elicit emergent long chains of thought (CoTs). Unlike supervised learning, it updates the model using…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Xinyu Zhu , Mengzhou Xia , Zhepei Wei , Wei-Lin Chen , Danqi Chen , Yu Meng

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods usually treat reward functions as black boxes. As such, these methods must extensively interact with the environment in order to discover rewards and optimal policies. In most RL applications, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Toryn Q. Klassen , Richard Valenzano , Sheila A. McIlraith

Recent studies on post-training large language models (LLMs) for reasoning through reinforcement learning (RL) typically focus on tasks that can be accurately verified and rewarded, such as solving math problems. In contrast, our research…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Ang Lv , Ruobing Xie , Xingwu Sun , Zhanhui Kang , Rui Yan

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a powerful framework for improving the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, current methods such as GRPO rely only on problems where the model responses to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Thanh-Long V. Le , Myeongho Jeon , Kim Vu , Viet Lai , Eunho Yang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) plays a crucial role in advancing autonomous driving technologies by maximizing reward functions to achieve the optimal policy. However, crafting these reward functions has been a complex, manual process in many…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Xu Han , Qiannan Yang , Xianda Chen , Xiaowen Chu , Meixin Zhu

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by the success of OpenAI's o-series. In RLVR, rewards are derived from verifiable signals-such…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves Large Language Model (LLM) performance on knowledge-intensive tasks but depends heavily on initial search query quality. Current methods, often using Reinforcement Learning (RL), typically focus…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Alan Dao , Thinh Le

Although outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) significantly advances the mathematical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), its reliance on computationally expensive ground-truth annotations imposes a severe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Zelin Zhang , Fei Cheng , Chenhui Chu

Recent successes of reinforcement learning (RL) in training large reasoning models motivate the question of whether self-training - the process where a model learns from its own judgments - can be sustained within RL. In this work, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Sheikh Shafayat , Fahim Tajwar , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Jeff Schneider , Andrea Zanette