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Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to improve complex reasoning abilities. However, state-of-the-art policy optimization methods often suffer from high computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Kianté Brantley , Mingyu Chen , Zhaolin Gao , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun , Wenhao Zhan , Xuezhou Zhang

We introduce a problem-level prioritization framework for RL post-training of large language models. Building on insights from prioritized replay in deep RL, as well as prior observations that rollouts with intermediate success rates tend…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Mehdi Fatemi

Reinforcement learning has been widely applied to diffusion and flow models for visual tasks such as text-to-image generation. However, these tasks remain challenging because diffusion models have intractable likelihoods, which creates a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Jaemoo Choi , Yuchen Zhu , Wei Guo , Petr Molodyk , Bo Yuan , Jinbin Bai , Yi Xin , Molei Tao , Yongxin Chen

This work studies reinforcement learning (RL) in the context of multi-period supply chains subject to constraints, e.g., on production and inventory. We introduce Distributional Constrained Policy Optimization (DCPO), a novel approach for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jaime Sabal Bermúdez , Antonio del Rio Chanona , Calvin Tsay

We introduce Entropy-Guided Sequence Weighting (EGSW), a novel approach that enhances the exploration-exploitation tradeoff by dynamically assigning weights to generated outputs based on their advantage and entropy for Reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Abdullah Vanlioglu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a critical stage in post-training large language models (LLMs), involving repeated interaction between rollout generation, reward evaluation, and centralized learning. Distributing rollout execution offers…

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning has emerged as a powerful approach for aligning diffusion models with black-box objectives. Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is a popular choice of method for policy optimization. While…

This dissertation investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) methods can be designed to be safe, sample-efficient, and robust. Framed through the unifying perspective of contextual-bandit RL, the work addresses two major application…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Shashank Gupta

Preference alignment is pivotal for empowering large language models (LLMs) to generate helpful and harmless responses. However, the performance of preference alignment is highly sensitive to the prevalent noise in the preference data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Xize Liang , Chao Chen , Shuang Qiu , Jie Wang , Yue Wu , Zhihang Fu , Zhihao Shi , Feng Wu , Jieping Ye

Post-training language models (LMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) can enhance their complex reasoning capabilities without supervised fine-tuning, as demonstrated by DeepSeek-R1-Zero. However, effectively utilizing RL for LMs requires…

We propose FSPO (Fair Sequence Policy Optimization), a sequence-level reinforcement learning method for LLMs that enforces length-fair clipping on the importance-sampling (IS) weight. We study RL methods with sequence-level IS and identify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Hanyi Mao , Quanjia Xiao , Lei Pang , Haixiao Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a key paradigm for aligning and optimizing large language models (LLMs). Standard approaches treat the LLM as the policy and apply RL directly over the full vocabulary space. However, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Jing-Cheng Pang , Liang Lu , Xian Tang , Kun Jiang , Sijie Wu , Kai Zhang , Xubin Li

Since the release of Deepseek-R1, reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a central approach for training large language models (LLMs) on reasoning tasks. Recent work has largely focused on modifying loss functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Weizhe Chen , Sven Koenig , Bistra Dilkina

As a key component of large language model (LLM) post-training, Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved reasoning performance. However, existing RLVR algorithms exhibit distinct stability issues:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Kun Yang , Zikang chen , Yanmeng Wang , Zhigen Li , Ning Cheng , Shaojun Wang , Jing Xiao

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

Domain-specific large language models (LLMs), typically developed by fine-tuning a pre-trained general-purpose LLM on specialized datasets, represent a significant advancement in applied AI. A common strategy in LLM fine-tuning is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Jing-Cheng Pang , Liu Sun , Chang Zhou , Xian Tang , Haichuan Ma , Kun Jiang , Jianlong Wang , Kai Zhang , Sijie Wu , Haoran Cai , Chenwei Wu , Xubin Li , Xin Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in business-critical domains such as finance, education, healthcare, and customer support, where users expect consistent and reliable recommendations. Yet LLMs often exhibit variability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Sonal Prabhune , Balaji Padmanabhan , Kaushik Dutta

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has recently advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While prior work has emphasized algorithmic design, data curation, and reward shaping, we investigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Xinjie Chen , Minpeng Liao , Guoxin Chen , Chengxi Li , Biao Fu , Kai Fan , Xinggao Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven remarkably effective at improving the accuracy of language models in verifiable and deterministic domains like mathematics. Here, we examine if current RL methods are also effective at optimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Michael Bereket , Jure Leskovec

Reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to improve the policy (denoiser) of diffusion large language models (dLLMs), while being hindered by the intractability of the policy likelihood. A dominant and efficient family of methods replaces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Xiaohang Tang , Keyue Jiang , Che Liu , Qifang Zhao , Xiaoxiao Xu , Sangwoong Yoon , Ilija Bogunovic