Related papers: Bootstrapped Mixed Rewards for RL Post-Training: I…
Large language models excel at short-horizon reasoning tasks, but performance drops as reasoning horizon lengths increase. Existing approaches to combat this rely on inference-time scaffolding or costly step-level supervision, neither of…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is effective in enhancing the accuracy of large language models in complex reasoning tasks. Existing RL policy optimization frameworks rely on final-answer correctness as feedback signals and rarely capture the…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…
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…
Recent curriculum techniques in the post-training stage of LLMs have been empirically observed to outperform non-curriculum approaches in improving reasoning performance, yet a principled understanding of their effectiveness and limitations…
We study a theory of reinforcement learning (RL) in which the learner receives binary feedback only once at the end of an episode. While this is an extreme test case for theory, it is also arguably more representative of real-world…
Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) is the generalization of standard reinforcement learning (RL) approaches to solve sequential decision making problems that consist of several, possibly conflicting, objectives. Generally, in…
Can reinforcement learning with hard, verifiable rewards teach a compact language model to reason about physics, or does it primarily learn to pattern-match toward correct answers? We study this question by training a 1.5B-parameter…
Reinforcement learning with human feedback for aligning large language models (LLMs) trains a reward model typically using ranking loss with comparison pairs.However, the training procedure suffers from an inherent problem: the uncontrolled…
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…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in many scenarios. However, it typically requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, some of which may be unsafe. Consequently, its application to…
Post-training for reasoning of large language models (LLMs) increasingly relies on verifiable rewards: deterministic checkers that provide 0-1 correctness signals. While reliable, such binary feedback is brittle--many tasks admit partially…
Transformers trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) with outcome-based supervision can spontaneously develop the ability to generate intermediate reasoning steps (Chain-of-Thought). Yet the mechanism by which sparse rewards drive policy…
Real-time control for robotics is a popular research area in the reinforcement learning community. Through the use of techniques such as reward shaping, researchers have managed to train online agents across a multitude of domains. Despite…
Language models must be adapted to understand and follow user instructions. Reinforcement learning is widely used to facilitate this -- typically using fixed criteria such as "helpfulness" and "harmfulness". In our work, we instead propose…
Reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in sparse reward settings, often requires prohibitively large numbers of interactions with the environment, thereby limiting its applicability to complex problems. To address this, several prior…
Although outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) significantly advances the mathematical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), its reliance on computationally expensive ground-truth annotations imposes a severe…
As machine learning has moved towards leveraging large models as priors for downstream tasks, the community has debated the right form of prior for solving reinforcement learning (RL) problems. If one were to try to prefetch as much…
When applying reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), the reward is learned from data and, therefore, always has some error. It is common to mitigate this by regularizing the policy with KL divergence from a base model, with the…
Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for unlocking reasoning capabilities in language models. However, relying on sparse rewards makes this process highly sample-inefficient, as models must navigate vast search spaces…