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Large language models are increasingly used for complex reasoning tasks where high-quality offline data such as expert-annotated solutions and distilled reasoning traces are often available. However, in environments with sparse rewards,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Yihao Liu , Shuocheng Li , Lang Cao , Yuhang Xie , Mengyu Zhou , Haoyu Dong , Xiaojun Ma , Shi Han , Dongmei Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models is an energy-intensive endeavor: training can be unstable, and the policy may gradually drift away from its pretrained weights. We present \emph{RLEP}\, -- \,Reinforcement Learning with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Hongzhi Zhang , Jia Fu , Jingyuan Zhang , Kai Fu , Qi Wang , Fuzheng Zhang , Guorui Zhou

Learning to rank (LTR) plays a crucial role in various Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. Although supervised LTR methods based on fine-grained relevance labels (e.g., document-level annotations) have achieved significant success, their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Yiteng Tu , Zhichao Xu , Tao Yang , Weihang Su , Yujia Zhou , Yiqun Liu , Fen Lin , Qin Liu , Qingyao Ai

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has significantly improved large language model reasoning, but existing RL fine-tuning methods rely heavily on heuristic techniques such as entropy regularization and reweighting to maintain stability. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Shiqi Liu , Zeyu He , Guojian Zhan , Letian Tao , Zhilong Zheng , Jiang Wu , Yinuo Wang , Yang Guan , Kehua Sheng , Bo Zhang , Keqiang Li , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li

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

Reinforcement Learning, particularly through policy gradient methods, has played a central role in enabling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, the optimization stability of policy gradients in this setting remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Luckeciano C. Melo , Alessandro Abate , Yarin Gal

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is the predominant algorithm for training text generation models. This paradigm relies on direct supervision examples, which is not applicable to many emerging applications, such as generating adversarial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Han Guo , Bowen Tan , Zhengzhong Liu , Eric P. Xing , Zhiting Hu

We propose reinforcement learning (RL) strategies tailored for reasoning in large language models (LLMs) under strict memory and compute limits, with a particular focus on compatibility with LoRA fine-tuning. Building on early policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Alan Lee , Harry Tong

Policy gradient algorithms have been successfully applied to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). KL regularization is ubiquitous, yet the design surface, choice of KL direction (forward vs. reverse),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Yifan Zhang , Yifeng Liu , Huizhuo Yuan , Yang Yuan , Quanquan Gu , Andrew Chi-Chih Yao

In this work, we address the problem of determining reliable policies in reinforcement learning (RL), with a focus on optimization under uncertainty and the need for performance guarantees. While classical RL algorithms aim at maximizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Nadir Farhi

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become central to training large language models (LLMs), yet the field lacks predictive scaling methodologies comparable to those established for pre-training. Despite rapidly rising compute budgets, there is…

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms such as PPO and GRPO are widely used to train large language models (LLMs) for multi-turn agentic tasks. However, in off-policy training pipelines, these methods often exhibit unstable optimization…

Reinforcement learning (RL) plays a crucial role in shaping the behavior of large language and reasoning models (LLMs/LRMs). However, it often produces brittle and unstable policies, leading to critical failures such as spurious reasoning,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Xingcheng Xu

Humans are masters at quickly learning many complex tasks, relying on an approximate understanding of the dynamics of their environments. In much the same way, we would like our learning agents to quickly adapt to new tasks. In this paper,…

High-fidelity simulation models are widely used to analyze complex stochastic systems, but their high computational cost motivates the development of cheaper surrogate models that approximate the simulation model's input-output…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-28 Mohammadmahdi Ghasemloo , David J. Eckman , Yaxian Li

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is highly effective for post-training autoregressive (AR) language models, yet its direct application to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) often triggers reward collapse. We identify two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Jianyuan Zhong , Kaibo Wang , Ding Ding , Zijin Feng , Haoli Bai , Yang Xiang , Jiacheng Sun , Qiang Xu

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to elicit reliable chain-of-thought reasoning. However, the training process remains bottlenecked by the computationally expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Bingshuai Liu , Ante Wang , Zijun Min , Liang Yao , Haibo Zhang , Yang Liu , Xu Han , Peng Li , Anxiang Zeng , Jinsong Su

Content moderation at scale remains one of the most pressing challenges in today's digital ecosystem, where billions of user- and AI-generated artifacts must be continuously evaluated for policy violations. Although recent advances in large…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a crucial approach for enhancing the capabilities of large language models. However, in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, the routing mechanism often introduces instability, even leading to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Wenhan Ma , Hailin Zhang , Liang Zhao , Yifan Song , Yudong Wang , Zhifang Sui , Fuli Luo

To meet the requirements of real-world applications, it is essential to control generations of large language models (LLMs). Prior research has tried to introduce reinforcement learning (RL) into controllable text generation while most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Wendi Li , Wei Wei , Kaihe Xu , Wenfeng Xie , Dangyang Chen , Yu Cheng