English
Related papers

Related papers: Towards Understanding Self-play for LLM Reasoning

200 papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with problems that require multi-step reasoning. For small-scale open-source models, Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) fails when correct solutions are rarely sampled even…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yihe Deng , I-Hung Hsu , Jun Yan , Zifeng Wang , Rujun Han , Gufeng Zhang , Yanfei Chen , Wei Wang , Tomas Pfister , Chen-Yu Lee

Recent advances highlight Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) as a promising method for enhancing LLMs' capabilities. However, it remains unclear whether the current practice of RLVR truly expands a model's reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Fang Wu , Weihao Xuan , Ximing Lu , Mingjie Liu , Yi Dong , Zaid Harchaoui , Yejin Choi

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) scales the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) but remains bottlenecked by limited labeled samples for continued data scaling. Reinforcement learning with intrinsic rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Chuyi Tan , Peiwen Yuan , Xinglin Wang , Yiwei Li , Shaoxiong Feng , Yueqi Zhang , Jiayi Shi , Ji Zhang , Boyuan Pan , Yao Hu , Kan Li

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks typically exhibit a fundamental safety-capability tradeoff, where improving task performance degrades safety alignment even on benign datasets. This degradation persists across…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically fine-tuned for reasoning tasks through a two-stage pipeline of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL), a process fraught with catastrophic forgetting and suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Lixuan He , Jie Feng , Yong Li

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a transformative approach for aligning and enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs), addressing critical challenges in instruction following, ethical alignment, and reasoning capabilities. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Saksham Sahai Srivastava , Vaneet Aggarwal

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

Self-play reinforcement learning trains language models on their own generated tasks, co-evolving a proposer and solver without human labels. Recent systems report strong reasoning gains, but collapse and instability are widely observed and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Sophia Xiao Pu , Zhaotian Weng , Chengzhi Liu , Jayanth Srinivasa , Gaowen Liu , William Yang Wang , Xin Eric Wang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently emerged as a core paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). To address the lack of verification signals at test time, prior studies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Wenkai Yang , Weijie Liu , Ruobing Xie , Yiju Guo , Lulu Wu , Saiyong Yang , Yankai Lin

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on large quantities of high-quality annotated data, or questions with well-defined ground truth answers in the case of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). While…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Justin Bauer , Thomas Walshe , Derek Pham , Harit Vishwakarma , Armin Parchami , Frederic Sala , Paroma Varma

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

In post-training for reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs), the current state of practice trains LLMs in two independent stages: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR, shortened as ``RL''…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Feiyang Kang , Michael Kuchnik , Karthik Padthe , Marin Vlastelica , Ruoxi Jia , Carole-Jean Wu , Newsha Ardalani

We study how reasoning evolves in a language model -- from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to reinforcement learning (RL) -- by analyzing how a set of theoretically-inspired datasets influences language model performance in chess. We find that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Lucas Dionisopoulos , Nicklas Majamaki , Prithviraj Ammanabrolu

Recent extensive research has demonstrated that the enhanced reasoning capabilities acquired by models through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) are primarily concentrated within the rank-1 components. Predicated on this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Hao Ye , Jisheng Dang , Junfeng Fang , Bimei Wang , Yizhou Zhang , Ning Lv , Wencan Zhang , Hong Peng , Bin Hu , Tat-Seng Chua

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has proven effective in improving Large Language Model's (LLM) reasoning ability. However, the learning dynamics of RLVR remain underexplored. In this paper, we reveal a counterintuitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yulin Chen , He He , Chen Zhao

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

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) reasoning have been largely attributed to the rise of reinforcement Learning (RL), which has shifted the community's focus away from the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) paradigm. Many studies…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated strong potential in training large language models (LLMs) capable of complex reasoning for real-world problem solving. More recently, RL has been leveraged to create sophisticated LLM-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Bowen Jin , Jinsung Yoon , Priyanka Kargupta , Sercan O. Arik , Jiawei Han

Improving Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in the post-training stage typically relies on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL), which require expensive and manually annotated multi-modal data--an ultimately…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Lai Wei , Yuting Li , Chen Wang , Yue Wang , Linghe Kong , Weiran Huang , Lichao Sun

Large language models have achieved significant reasoning improvements through reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). Yet as model capabilities grow, constructing high-quality reward signals becomes increasingly difficult,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Salman Rahman , Jingyan Shen , Anna Mordvina , Hamid Palangi , Saadia Gabriel , Pavel Izmailov