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Related papers: Rethinking Entropy Interventions in RLVR: An Entro…

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We propose ERA, a new paradigm that constrains the sampling entropy above given thresholds by applying specially designed activations to the outputs of models. Our approach demonstrates broad effectiveness across different domains: 1) for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Zilin Kang , Chonghua Liao , Tingqiang Xu , Huazhe Xu

Reinforcement Learning with Verified Reward (RLVR) has emerged as a critical paradigm for advancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Most existing RLVR methods, such as GRPO and its variants, ensure stable updates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Qingyuan Wu , Yuhui Wang , Simon Sinong Zhan , Yanning Dai , Shilong Deng , Sarra Habchi , Qi Zhu , Matthias Gallé , Chao Huang

Large language model post-training relies on reinforcement learning to improve model capability and alignment quality. However, the off-policy training paradigm introduces distribution shift, which often pushes the policy beyond the trust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Zhenpeng Su , Leiyu Pan , Minxuan Lv , Tiehua Mei , Zijia Lin , Yuntao Li , Wenping Hu , Ruiming Tang , Kun Gai , Guorui Zhou

Cross-cultural entity translation remains challenging for large language models (LLMs) as literal or phonetic renderings are usually yielded instead of culturally appropriate translations in context. However, relevant knowledge may already…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Jiang Zhou , Xiaohu Zhao , Xinwei Wu , Tianyu Dong , Hao Wang , Yangyang Liu , Heng Liu , Linlong Xu , Longyue Wang , Weihua Luo , Deyi Xiong

While reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is effective to improve the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), its reliance on human-annotated labels leads to the scaling up dilemma, especially for complex tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Zizhuo Zhang , Jianing Zhu , Xinmu Ge , Zihua Zhao , Zhanke Zhou , Xuan Li , Xiao Feng , Jiangchao Yao , Bo Han

Entropy minimization (EM) trains the model to concentrate even more probability mass on its most confident outputs. We show that this simple objective alone, without any labeled data, can substantially improve large language models' (LLMs)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Shivam Agarwal , Zimin Zhang , Lifan Yuan , Jiawei Han , Hao Peng

Despite the many recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), the question of learning policies that robustly satisfy state constraints under unknown disturbances remains open. In this paper, we offer a new perspective on achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Pierre-François Massiani , Alexander von Rohr , Lukas Haverbeck , Sebastian Trimpe

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards~(RLVR) has become a prominent paradigm to enhance the capabilities (i.e.\ long-context) of Large Language Models~(LLMs). However, it often relies on gold-standard answers or explicit evaluation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yao Xiao , Lei Wang , Yue Deng , Guanzheng Chen , Ziqi Jin , Jung-jae Kim , Xiaoli Li , Roy Ka-wei Lee , Lidong Bing

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) on chain-of-thought reasoning has become a standard part of language model post-training recipes. A common assumption is that the reasoning chains trained through RLVR reliably represent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Qinan Yu , Alexa Tartaglini , Peter Hase , Carlos Guestrin , Christopher Potts

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become the dominant paradigm for strengthening the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Yet the rule-based reward functions commonly used on mathematical or programming benchmarks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Haoyang He , Zihua Rong , Kun Ji , Chenyang Li , Qing Huang , Chong Xia , Lan Yang , Honggang Zhang

Test-time scaling has been shown to substantially improve large language models' (LLMs) mathematical reasoning. However, for a large portion of mathematical corpora, especially theorem proving, RLVR's scalability is limited: intermediate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Zhen Wang , Zhifeng Gao , Guolin Ke

RL training of multi-turn LLM agents is inherently unstable, and reasoning quality directly determines task performance. Entropy is widely used to track reasoning stability. However, entropy only measures diversity within the same input,…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), which uses simple binary feedback to post-train large language models, has found significant empirical success. However, a principled understanding of why it works is lacking. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Joe Suk , Yaqi Duan

Balancing exploration and exploitation is a central goal in reinforcement learning (RL). Despite recent advances in enhancing large language model (LLM) reasoning, most methods lean toward exploitation, and increasingly encounter…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Daixuan Cheng , Shaohan Huang , Xuekai Zhu , Bo Dai , Wayne Xin Zhao , Zhenliang Zhang , Furu Wei

Existing methods to enhance the reasoning capability of large language models predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL) on reasoning-specific data. These approaches critically depend on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Qingyang Zhang , Haitao Wu , Changqing Zhang , Peilin Zhao , Yatao Bian

Large language models (LLMs) trained via KL-regularized reinforcement learning demonstrate strong instruction following, self-correction, and reasoning abilities. Yet their theoretical underpinnings remain limited. We exploit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Zhiquan Tan , Yinrong Hong

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has recently enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly for mathematical problem solving. However, a fundamental limitation remains: as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Wenhao Deng , Long Wei , Chenglei Yu , Tailin Wu

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has advanced LLM reasoning, but remains constrained by inefficient exploration under limited rollout budgets, leading to low sampling success and unstable training in complex tasks. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yiju Guo , Tianyi Hu , Zexu Sun , Yankai Lin

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance in surface-level text generation, their nature in handling complex multi-step reasoning tasks often remains one of ``statistical fitting'' rather than systematic logical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Lianlei Shan , Han Chen , Yixuan Wang , Zhenjie Liu , Wei Li

Entropy-based confidence signals are increasingly leveraged to improve reasoning in large language models (LLMs), yet existing approaches treat confidence as a static quantity -- typically aggregated over tokens. We show that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Chenghua Zhu , Siyan Wu , Xiangkang Zeng , Zishan Xu , Zhaolu Kang , Yifu Guo , Yuquan Lu , Junduan Huang , Guojing Zhou