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Solving complex tasks in a single attempt is challenging for large language models (LLMs). Iterative interaction with the environment and feedback is often required to achieve success, making effective feedback utilization a critical topic.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Yanyang Li , Michael Lyu , Liwei Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance across diverse tasks but come with substantial energy and computational costs, particularly in request-heavy scenarios. In many real-world applications, the full scale and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Patrick Wilhelm , Thorsten Wittkopp , Odej Kao

Large language models (LLMs) are known for their exceptional performance across a range of natural language processing tasks, but their deployment comes at a high computational and financial cost. On the other hand, smaller language models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Adarsh MS , Jithin VG , Ditto PS

Temporal reasoning over long, multi-session dialogues is a critical capability for conversational agents. However, existing works and our pilot study have shown that as dialogue histories grow in length and accumulate noise, current…

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning have been hindered by a persistent challenge: exploration collapse. The semantic homogeneity of random rollouts often traps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Huilin Deng , Hongchen Luo , Yue Zhu , Long Li , Zhuoyue Chen , Xinghao Zhao , Ming Li , Jihai Zhang , Mengchang Wang , Yang Cao , Yu Kang

Query generation is a critical task for web search engines (e.g. Google, Bing) and recommendation systems. Recently, state-of-the-art query generation methods leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) for their strong capabilities in context…

Inference-time computation has greatly enhanced the performance of large language models (LLMs) on challenging reasoning tasks, but this strategy can incur high inference costs. One solution is to route intermediate chain-of-thought (CoT)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Wenwen Si , Insup Lee , Osbert Bastani

We study a novel language model architecture that is capable of scaling test-time computation by implicitly reasoning in latent space. Our model works by iterating a recurrent block, thereby unrolling to arbitrary depth at test-time. This…

We consider a single large language model (LLM) server that serves a heterogeneous stream of queries belonging to $N$ distinct task types. Queries arrive according to a Poisson process, and each type occurs with a known prior probability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Emre Ozbas , Melih Bastopcu

Modern sequential recommender systems, ranging from lightweight transformer-based variants to large language models, have become increasingly prominent in academia and industry due to their strong performance in the next-item prediction…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Danil Gusak , Anna Volodkevich , Anton Klenitskiy , Alexey Vasilev , Evgeny Frolov

Deep research agents rely on iterative retrieval and reasoning to answer complex queries, but scaling test-time computation raises significant efficiency concerns. We study how to allocate reasoning budget in deep search pipelines, focusing…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Sahel Sharifymoghaddam , Jimmy Lin

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) is a subset of machine learning that introduces constraints into the traditional reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Unlike conventional RL which aims solely to maximize cumulative rewards, CRL…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Xiaoshan Lin , Sadık Bera Yüksel , Yasin Yazıcıoğlu , Derya Aksaray

Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) often suffers from reward over-optimization, where a policy model hacks the reward signals to achieve high scores while producing low-quality outputs. Our theoretical analysis shows that the key lies in…

Deploying models on target domain data subject to distribution shift requires adaptation. Test-time training (TTT) emerges as a solution to this adaptation under a realistic scenario where access to full source domain data is not available,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yongyi Su , Xun Xu , Tianrui Li , Kui Jia

Increasing test-time computation has emerged as a promising direction for improving language model performance, particularly in scenarios where model finetuning is impractical or impossible due to computational constraints or private model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Gonçalo Faria , Noah A. Smith

In model-based solution approaches to the problem of learning in an unknown environment, exploring to learn the model parameters takes a toll on the regret. The optimal performance with respect to regret or PAC bounds is achievable, if the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-10-13 P. Prasanna , Sarath Chandar , Balaraman Ravindran

When applied in healthcare, reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to dynamically match the right interventions to subjects to maximize population benefit. However, the learned policy may disproportionately allocate efficacious actions to one…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-15 Jitao Wang , Chengchun Shi , John D. Piette , Joshua R. Loftus , Donglin Zeng , Zhenke Wu

Recent advances in language models (LMs) have led to significant improvements in quality on complex NLP tasks, but at the expense of increased inference costs. Cascading offers a simple strategy to achieve more favorable cost-quality…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Neha Gupta , Harikrishna Narasimhan , Wittawat Jitkrittum , Ankit Singh Rawat , Aditya Krishna Menon , Sanjiv Kumar

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit strong linguistic abilities while remaining unreliable on multi-step reasoning tasks, particularly when deployed without additional training or fine-tuning. In this work, we study inference-time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Vinay Sharma , Manish Jain

Outcome-reward reinforcement learning (RL) is a common and increasingly significant way to refine the step-by-step reasoning of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). In the multiple-choice setting - a dominant format for multimodal…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Jiahao Wang , Weiye Xu , Aijun Yang , Wengang Zhou , Lewei Lu , Houqiang Li , Xiaohua Wang , Jinguo Zhu