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Long chain-of-thought (CoT) significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, extensive reasoning traces lead to inefficiencies and increased time-to-first-token (TTFT). We propose a training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Roy Xie , David Qiu , Deepak Gopinath , Dong Lin , Yanchao Sun , Chong Wang , Saloni Potdar , Bhuwan Dhingra

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a general framework concerned with an agent that seeks to maximize rewards in an environment. The learning typically happens through trial and error using explorative methods, such as epsilon-greedy. There are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Per-Arne Andersen , Morten Goodwin , Ole-Christoffer Granmo

The development of autonomous agents for complex, long-horizon tasks is a central goal in AI. However, dominant training paradigms face a critical limitation: reinforcement learning (RL) methods that optimize solely for final task success…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Zijing Zhang , Ziyang Chen , Mingxiao Li , Zhaopeng Tu , Xiaolong Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in complex reasoning tasks through both post-training and test-time scaling laws. While prevalent test-time scaling approaches are often realized by using external reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Fuxiang Zhang , Jiacheng Xu , Chaojie Wang , Ce Cui , Yang Liu , Bo An

Reinforcement learning (RL) with unit test feedback has enhanced large language models' (LLMs) code generation, but relies on sparse rewards provided only after complete code evaluation, limiting learning efficiency and incremental…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Ning Dai , Zheng Wu , Renjie Zheng , Ziyun Wei , Wenlei Shi , Xing Jin , Guanlin Liu , Chen Dun , Liang Huang , Lin Yan

Reinforcement learning (RL) solves sequential decision-making problems via a trial-and-error process interacting with the environment. While RL achieves outstanding success in playing complex video games that allow huge trial-and-error,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Fan-Ming Luo , Tian Xu , Hang Lai , Xiong-Hui Chen , Weinan Zhang , Yang Yu

Reward modeling is essential for aligning large language models with human preferences through reinforcement learning. To provide accurate reward signals, a reward model (RM) should stimulate deep thinking and conduct interpretable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Xiusi Chen , Gaotang Li , Ziqi Wang , Bowen Jin , Cheng Qian , Yu Wang , Hongru Wang , Yu Zhang , Denghui Zhang , Tong Zhang , Hanghang Tong , Heng Ji

Reinforcement learning (RL) for mathematical reasoning can suffer from reward sparsity: for challenging problems, LLM fails to sample any correct trajectories, preventing RL from receiving meaningful positive feedback. At the same time,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Yangzhen Wu , Shanda Li , Zixin Wen , Xin Zhou , Ameet Talwalkar , Yiming Yang , Wenhao Huang , Tianle Cai

With the growing use of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), training large language models (LLMs) for context-sensitive reasoning and faithfulness is increasingly important. Existing RAG-oriented reinforcement learning (RL) methods rely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Zhehao Tan , Yihan Jiao , Dan Yang , Junjie Wang , Duolin Sun , Jie Feng , Xidong Wang , Lei Liu , Yue Shen , Jian Wang , Jinjie Gu

Recent advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs), exemplified by DeepSeek R1, have shown that even a simple question-answering task can substantially improve an LLM's reasoning capabilities. In this work,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Stephen Chung , Wenyu Du , Jie Fu

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for decision processes with non-Markovian reward, in which high-level knowledge of the task in the form of reward machines is available to the learner. We consider probabilistic reward machines with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Hippolyte Bourel , Anders Jonsson , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Chenxiao Ma , Mohammad Sadegh Talebi

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, reinforcement learning for LLMs faces substantial data scarcity challenges,…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a powerful framework for training robotic agents using pre-collected, suboptimal datasets, eliminating the need for costly, time-consuming, and potentially hazardous online interactions. This is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Tung M. Luu , Donghoon Lee , Younghwan Lee , Chang D. Yoo

Fairness in classification tasks has traditionally focused on bias removal from neural representations, but recent trends favor algorithmic methods that embed fairness into the training process. These methods steer models towards fair…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Leon Eshuijs , Shihan Wang , Antske Fokkens

Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. A popular alternative is reward learning, where reward functions are inferred from human feedback rather than manually specified.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Chaitanya Kharyal , Calarina Muslimani , Matthew E. Taylor

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve remarkable reasoning in domains like mathematics and coding, where verifiable rewards provide clear signals. However, extending this paradigm to financial…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Rui Sun , Yifan Sun , Sheng Xu , Li Zhao , Jing Li , Daxin Jiang , Cheng Hua , Zuo Bai

Recent studies have proposed leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as information retrievers through query rewriting. However, for challenging corpora, we argue that enhancing queries alone is insufficient for robust semantic matching;…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Jingming Liu , Yumeng Li , Wei Shi , Yao-Xiang Ding , Hui Su , Kun Zhou

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as automated evaluators that assign numeric scores to model outputs, a paradigm known as LLM-as-a-Judge. However, standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods typically rely on binary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Yasi Zhang , Tianyu Chen , Mingyuan Zhou , Oscar Leong , Ying Nian Wu , Michal Lukasik

Many continuous control tasks have easily formulated objectives, yet using them directly as a reward in reinforcement learning (RL) leads to suboptimal policies. Therefore, many classical control tasks guide RL training using complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-21 Aleksandra Faust , Anthony Francis , Dar Mehta

Learning reward functions for physical skills are challenging due to the vast spectrum of skills, the high-dimensionality of state and action space, and nuanced sensory feedback. The complexity of these tasks makes acquiring expert…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Yuwei Zeng , Yiqing Xu