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Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance on complex reasoning tasks, with reinforcement learning under verifiable rewards (RLVR) emerging as a principled framework for aligning model behavior with reasoning chains.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Yunjian Zhang , Sudong Wang , Yang Li , Peiran Xu , Conghao Zhou , Xiaoyue Ma , Jianing Li , Yao Zhu

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks typically exhibit a fundamental safety-capability tradeoff, where improving task performance degrades safety alignment even on benign datasets. This degradation persists across…

In this work, we study the problem of code generation with a large language model (LLM), with a focus on generating SQL queries from natural language questions. We ask: Instead of using supervised fine tuning with text-code pairs, can we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Atharv Kulkarni , Vivek Srikumar

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a prominent paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the entropy of LLMs usually collapses during RLVR training, leading…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Renren Jin , Pengzhi Gao , Yuqi Ren , Zhuowen Han , Tongxuan Zhang , Wuwei Huang , Wei Liu , Jian Luan , Deyi Xiong

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has driven significant performance gains in reasoning-oriented large language models (LLMs), yet its internal training dynamics remain largely a black box. In this work, we perform a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Tianle Wang , Jiayu Liu , Zhongyuan Wu , Shenghao Jin , Wei Chen , Hao Xu , Ning Miao

In this work, we explore joint energy-based model (EBM) training during the finetuning of pretrained text encoders (e.g., Roberta) for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Our experiments show that EBM training can help the model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-22 Tianxing He , Bryan McCann , Caiming Xiong , Ehsan Hosseini-Asl

Language model (LM) alignment improves model outputs to reflect human preferences while preserving the capabilities of the base model. The most common alignment approaches are (i) reinforcement learning, which maximizes the expected reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Lucas Monteiro Paes , Natalie Mackraz , Barry-John Theobald , Federico Danieli

Large language models (LLMs) are a promising venue for natural language understanding and generation tasks. However, current LLMs are far from reliable: they are prone to generate non-factual information and, more crucially, to contradict…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-22 Diego Calanzone , Stefano Teso , Antonio Vergari

Recent advancements in reasoning-focused language models such as OpenAI's O1 and DeepSeek-R1 have shown that scaling test-time computation-through chain-of-thought reasoning and iterative exploration-can yield substantial improvements on…

Integrating free-text explanations to in-context learning of large language models (LLM) is shown to elicit strong reasoning capabilities along with reasonable explanations. In this paper, we consider the problem of leveraging the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Shiyang Li , Jianshu Chen , Yelong Shen , Zhiyu Chen , Xinlu Zhang , Zekun Li , Hong Wang , Jing Qian , Baolin Peng , Yi Mao , Wenhu Chen , Xifeng Yan

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently emerged as a promising framework for improving reasoning abilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, policy optimized with binary verification prone to overlook…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Jinghao Zhang , Naishan Zheng , Ruilin Li , Dongzhou Cheng , Zheming Liang , Feng Zhao , Jiaqi Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) display strikingly different generalization behaviors: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often narrows capability, whereas reinforcement-learning (RL) tuning tends to preserve it. The reasons behind this divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Haoyue Bai , Yiyou Sun , Wenjie Hu , Shi Qiu , Maggie Ziyu Huan , Peiyang Song , Robert Nowak , Dawn Song

Generating grounded and trustworthy responses remains a key challenge for large language models (LLMs). While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with citation-based grounding holds promise, instruction-tuned models frequently fail even in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Shang Hong Sim , Tej Deep Pala , Vernon Toh , Hai Leong Chieu , Amir Zadeh , Chuan Li , Navonil Majumder , Soujanya Poria

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key technique for enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), with policy-gradient algorithms dominating the post-training stage because of their efficiency and effectiveness.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Chang Tian , Matthew B. Blaschko , Mingzhe Xing , Xiuxing Li , Yinliang Yue , Marie-Francine Moens

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

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards(RLVR) has demonstrated great potential in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, its success has thus far been largely confined to the mathematical and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Mengyu Zhang , Siyu Ding , Weichong Yin , Yu Sun , Hua Wu

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have recently shown promise in solving complex math problems when optimized with Reinforcement Learning (RL). But conventional approaches rely on outcome-only rewards that provide sparse feedback, resulting in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Tao He , Rongchuan Mu , Lizi Liao , Yixin Cao , Ming Liu , Bing Qin

Recent advances in large language model (LLM) reasoning, led by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), have inspired self-play post-training, where models improve by generating and solving their own problems. While self-play…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Justin Yang Chae , Md Tanvirul Alam , Nidhi Rastogi

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite its efficacy, RLVR faces a meta-learning bottleneck: it lacks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Shiting Huang , Zecheng Li , Yu Zeng , Qingnan Ren , Zhen Fang , Qisheng Su , Kou Shi , Lin Chen , Zehui Chen , Feng Zhao

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in creative tasks such as storytelling and E-mail generation. However, as LLMs are primarily trained on final text results rather than intermediate revisions, it might…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-21 Lei Shu , Liangchen Luo , Jayakumar Hoskere , Yun Zhu , Yinxiao Liu , Simon Tong , Jindong Chen , Lei Meng