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Recent analyses question whether reinforcement learning (RL) is responsible for strong reasoning in large language models (LLMs). At the same time, distillation and inference-time sampling, including power sampling, have emerged as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Akiyoshi Tomihari , Issei Sato

Training large language models as retrieval-augmented reasoning agents typically combines reinforcement learning with an SFT cold start distilled from a stronger model. However, this paradigm overlooks two fundamental factors: the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zhipeng Qian , Zihan Liang , Yufei Ma , Ben Chen , Huangyu Dai , Jiayi Ji , Chenyi Lei , Wenwu Ou , Xiaoshuai Sun , Qibin Hou

Adapting language models (LMs) to new tasks via post-training carries the risk of degrading existing capabilities -- a phenomenon classically known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, toward identifying guidelines for mitigating this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Howard Chen , Noam Razin , Karthik Narasimhan , Danqi Chen

Current large language models can perform reasonably well on complex tasks that require step-by-step reasoning with few-shot learning. Are these models applying reasoning skills they have learnt during pre-training and reason outside of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-02 Ping Yu , Tianlu Wang , Olga Golovneva , Badr AlKhamissi , Siddharth Verma , Zhijing Jin , Gargi Ghosh , Mona Diab , Asli Celikyilmaz

Large language models excel at basic reasoning but struggle with tasks that require interaction with external tools. We present RLFactory, a plug-and-play reinforcement learning post-training framework for multi-round tool use. RLFactory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Jiajun Chai , Guojun Yin , Zekun Xu , Chuhuai Yue , Yi Jia , Siyu Xia , Xiaohan Wang , Jiwen Jiang , Xiaoguang Li , Chengqi Dong , Hang He , Wei Lin

Associative thinking--the ability to connect seemingly unrelated ideas--is a foundational element of human creativity and problem-solving. This paper explores whether reinforcement learning (RL) guided by associative thinking principles can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mukul Singh , Ananya Singha , Aishni Parab , Pronita Mehrotra , Sumit Gulwani

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have recently shown impressive performance on complex reasoning tasks, often by engaging in self-reflective behaviors such as self-critique and backtracking. However, not all reflections are beneficial-many are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Hanbin Wang , Jingwei Song , Jinpeng Li , Qi Zhu , Fei Mi , Ganqu Cui , Yasheng Wang , Lifeng Shang

Reinforcement learning (RL) as post-training is crucial for enhancing the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) in coding and math. However, their capacity for visual semantic arithmetic, inferring relationships from images,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Chuou Xu , Liya Ji , Qifeng Chen

Enabling large language models with external tools has become a pivotal strategy for extending their functionality beyond text space. To enhance LLMs' tool-calling abilities, previous approaches primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Shaokun Zhang , Yi Dong , Jieyu Zhang , Jan Kautz , Bryan Catanzaro , Andrew Tao , Qingyun Wu , Zhiding Yu , Guilin Liu

Simulation offers a scalable and low-cost way to enrich vision-language-action (VLA) training, reducing reliance on expensive real-robot demonstrations. However, most sim-real co-training methods rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Liangzhi Shi , Shuaihang Chen , Feng Gao , Yinuo Chen , Kang Chen , Tonghe Zhang , Hongzhi Zang , Weinan Zhang , Chao Yu , Yu Wang

Much literature has shown that prompt-based learning is an efficient method to make use of the large pre-trained language model. Recent works also exhibit the possibility of steering a chatbot's output by plugging in an appropriate prompt.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Hsuan Su , Pohan Chi , Shih-Cheng Huang , Chung Ho Lam , Saurav Sahay , Shang-Tse Chen , Hung-yi Lee

Reinforcement fine-tuning played an instrumental role in enhancing the instruction-following and reasoning abilities of large language models. In this work, we employ reinforcement fine-tuning for materials design, in which discriminative…

Materials Science · Physics 2026-01-19 Zhendong Cao , Lei Wang

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) dominate the post-training landscape for mathematical reasoning, yet differ fundamentally in their reliance on expert trajectories. To understand the optimal way to harness these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Bowen Ding , Yuhan Chen , Jiayang Lyv , Jiyao Yuan , Qi Zhu , Shuangshuang Tian , Dantong Zhu , Futing Wang , Heyuan Deng , Fei Mi , Lifeng Shang , Tao Lin

This work presents In-Context Policy Iteration, an algorithm for performing Reinforcement Learning (RL), in-context, using foundation models. While the application of foundation models to RL has received considerable attention, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Ethan Brooks , Logan Walls , Richard L. Lewis , Satinder Singh

The success of RL for LLM post-training stems from an unreasonably uninformative source: a single bit of information per rollout as binary reward or preference label. At the other extreme, distillation offers dense supervision but requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Yuda Song , Lili Chen , Fahim Tajwar , Remi Munos , Deepak Pathak , J. Andrew Bagnell , Aarti Singh , Andrea Zanette

Large Language Models (LLMs) face the "knowledge cutoff" challenge, where their frozen parametric memory prevents direct internalization of new information. While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is commonly used to update model knowledge, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Pingzhi Tang , Yiding Wang , Muhan Zhang

The reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming a central focus of study in NLP. In this paper, we consider the case of syllogistic reasoning, an area of deductive reasoning studied extensively in logic and cognitive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Leonardo Bertolazzi , Albert Gatt , Raffaella Bernardi

In recent years, many explanation methods have been proposed to explain individual classifications of deep neural networks. However, how to leverage the created explanations to improve the learning process has been less explored. As the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Jindong Gu , Zhiliang Wu , Volker Tresp

LLMs' performance on complex tasks is still unsatisfactory. A key issue is that presently LLMs learn in a data-driven schema, while the instructions about these complex tasks are both scarce and hard to collect or construct. On the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Yang Zhao , Li Du , Xiao Ding , Kai Xiong , Ting Liu , Bing Qin

Developing robotic agents that can perform well in diverse environments while showing a variety of behaviors is a key challenge in AI and robotics. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods often create agents that specialize in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Octi Zhang , Quanquan Peng , Rosario Scalise , Bryon Boots