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Recent advancements have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) can substantially improve the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). The effectiveness of such RL training, however, depends critically on the exploration space…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Haoyuan Wu , Hai Wang , Jiajia Wu , Jinxiang Ou , Keyao Wang , Weile Chen , Zihao Zheng , Bei Yu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) knowledge with sequential decision-making tasks. However, few studies have thoroughly investigated the impact on LLM agents capabilities of…

In this work, we introduce Reinforcement Pre-Training (RPT) as a new scaling paradigm for large language models and reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, we reframe next-token prediction as a reasoning task trained using RL, where it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Qingxiu Dong , Li Dong , Yao Tang , Tianzhu Ye , Yutao Sun , Zhifang Sui , Furu Wei

Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach for improving the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) system. However, due to its instability, successfully RL training is challenging,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-28 Lijun Wu , Fei Tian , Tao Qin , Jianhuang Lai , Tie-Yan Liu

We study how reasoning evolves in a language model -- from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to reinforcement learning (RL) -- by analyzing how a set of theoretically-inspired datasets influences language model performance in chess. We find that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Lucas Dionisopoulos , Nicklas Majamaki , Prithviraj Ammanabrolu

Recent advances in reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are largely driven by reinforcement learning (RL), yet the underlying parameter dynamics during RL training remain poorly understood. This work identifies two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yuchen Cai , Ding Cao , Xin Xu , Zijun Yao , Yuqing Huang , Zhenyu Tan , Benyi Zhang , Guangzhong Sun , Guiquan Liu , Junfeng Fang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in training large language models (LLMs) for preventing unexpected outputs, eg reducing harmfulness and errors. However, existing RL methods mostly adopt the instance-level reward, which is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Zhipeng Chen , Kun Zhou , Wayne Xin Zhao , Junchen Wan , Fuzheng Zhang , Di Zhang , Ji-Rong Wen

Generative models have made significant progress in synthesizing visual content, including images, videos, and 3D/4D structures. However, they are typically trained with surrogate objectives such as likelihood or reconstruction loss, which…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Yuanzhi Liang , Yijie Fang , Ke Hao , Rui Li , Ziqi Ni , Ruijie Su , Chi Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) and classical machine learning methods offer complementary strengths for predictive modeling, yet their fundamentally different representations and training paradigms hinder effective integration: LLMs rely on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yunshuo Tian , Akayou Kitessa , Tanuja Chitnis , Yijun Zhao

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an important machine learning paradigm for solving sequential decision-making problems. Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in this field due to the rapid development of deep neural networks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Chaofan Pan , Xin Yang , Yanhua Li , Wei Wei , Tianrui Li , Bo An , Jiye Liang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the dominant paradigm for improving the performance of language models on complex reasoning tasks. Despite the substantial empirical gains demonstrated by RL-based training methods like GRPO, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Jiayu Wang , Yifei Ming , Zixuan Ke , Caiming Xiong , Shafiq Joty , Aws Albarghouthi , Frederic Sala

Reasoning models excel in complex problem solving but exhibit a concerning trade off between reasoning capabilities and instruction following abilities. Existing approaches for improving instruction following rely on stronger external…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Qingyu Ren , Qianyu He , Bowei Zhang , Jie Zeng , Jiaqing Liang , Yanghua Xiao , Weikang Zhou , Zeye Sun , Fei Yu

Post-training of large language models routinely interleaves supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning (RL). These two methods have different objectives: SFT minimizes the cross-entropy loss between model outputs and expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xueyan Niu , Bo Bai , Wei Han , Weixi Zhang

Recent advances in reasoning-centric language models have highlighted reinforcement learning (RL) as a promising method for aligning models with verifiable rewards. However, it remains contentious whether RL truly expands a model's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Mingjie Liu , Shizhe Diao , Ximing Lu , Jian Hu , Xin Dong , Yejin Choi , Jan Kautz , Yi Dong

The majority of language model training builds on imitation learning. It covers pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and affects the starting conditions for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The simplicity and scalability…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on massive datasets and later instruction-tuned via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). Best practices emphasize large, diverse pretraining data, whereas post-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Adel Javanmard , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Vahab Mirrokni

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a standard post-training recipe for improving Large Language Models (LLM) reasoning, but why it works remains unclear. We revisit the common claim that ``SFT memorizes,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Hangzhan Jin , Sitao Luan , Tianwei Ni , Sicheng Lyu , Guillaume Rabusseau , Reihaneh Rabbany , Doina Precup , Mohammad Hamdaqa

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Dake Bu , Wei Huang , Andi Han , Atsushi Nitanda , Hau-San Wong , Qingfu Zhang , Taiji Suzuki

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, reinforcement learning for LLMs faces substantial data scarcity challenges,…