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As a subfield of machine learning, reinforcement learning (RL) aims at empowering one's capabilities in behavioural decision making by using interaction experience with the world and an evaluative feedback. Unlike traditional supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-27 Chao Yu , Jiming Liu , Shamim Nemati

Debates about large language model post-training often treat supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as imitation and reinforcement learning (RL) as discovery. But this distinction is too coarse. What matters is whether a training procedure increases…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yuhao Li , Shengchao Liu

While reinforcement learning (RL) successfully enhances reasoning in large language models, its role in fostering compositional generalization (the ability to synthesize novel skills from known components) is often conflated with mere…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Simon Park , Simran Kaur , Sanjeev Arora

Standard training pipelines for large language models (LLMs) are typically unidirectional, progressing from pre-training to post-training. However, the potential for a bidirectional process--where insights from post-training retroactively…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Junjie Huang , Jiarui Qin , Di Yin , Weiwen Liu , Yong Yu , Xing Sun , Weinan Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in text generation to alleviate the exposure bias issue or to utilize non-parallel datasets. The reward function plays an important role in making RL training successful. However, previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-19 Yongchang Hao , Yuxin Liu , Lili Mou

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated strong potential in training large language models (LLMs) capable of complex reasoning for real-world problem solving. More recently, RL has been leveraged to create sophisticated LLM-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Bowen Jin , Jinsung Yoon , Priyanka Kargupta , Sercan O. Arik , Jiawei Han

Understanding real-world videos with complex semantics and long temporal dependencies remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has demonstrated strong capabilities in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Hongyu Li , Songhao Han , Yue Liao , Junfeng Luo , Jialin Gao , Shuicheng Yan , Si Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language model (MLLM). However, current RL pipelines often suffer from training inefficiencies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Linghao Zhu , Yiran Guan , Dingkang Liang , Jianzhong Ju , Zhenbo Luo , Bin Qin , Jian Luan , Yuliang Liu , Xiang Bai

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated potential in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but such training typically demands substantial efforts in creating and annotating data. In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Hangfan Zhang , Siyuan Xu , Zhimeng Guo , Huaisheng Zhu , Shicheng Liu , Xinrun Wang , Qiaosheng Zhang , Yang Chen , Peng Ye , Lei Bai , Shuyue Hu

Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to expand the capabilities of language models, but it is unclear if current RL techniques promote the discovery of novel behaviors, or simply sharpen those already present in the base model. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Jens Tuyls , Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Jordan T. Ash

Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning has become a key technique for enhancing large language models (LLMs) on reasoning-intensive tasks, motivating its extension to vision-language models (VLMs). While RL-tuned VLMs improve on visual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Rosie Zhao , Anshul Shah , Xiaoyu Zhu , Xinke Deng , Zhongyu Jiang , Yang Yang , Joerg Liebelt , Arnab Mondal

To be successful in real-world tasks, Reinforcement Learning (RL) needs to exploit the compositional, relational, and hierarchical structure of the world, and learn to transfer it to the task at hand. Recent advances in representation…

While scaling laws for large language models (LLMs) during pre-training have been extensively studied, their behavior under reinforcement learning (RL) post-training remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a systematic empirical…

Reinforcement learning (RL) models have shown the capability of learning complex behaviors, but quantitatively assessing those behaviors - which is critical for safety assurance and the discovery of novel strategies - is challenging. By…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-23 William T. Redman

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in real-world decision-making across diverse domains, including gaming, robotics, online advertising, public health, and natural language processing. Despite these advances, a…

Applications · Statistics 2026-01-23 Asim H. Gazi , Yongyi Guo , Daiqi Gao , Ziping Xu , Kelly W. Zhang , Susan A. Murphy

The training dynamics and generalization properties of neural networks (NN) can be precisely characterized in function space via the neural tangent kernel (NTK). Structural changes to the NTK during training reflect feature learning and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-11 Haozhe Shan , Blake Bordelon

In post-training for reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs), the current state of practice trains LLMs in two independent stages: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR, shortened as ``RL''…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Feiyang Kang , Michael Kuchnik , Karthik Padthe , Marin Vlastelica , Ruoxi Jia , Carole-Jean Wu , Newsha Ardalani

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs) to improve reasoning. Approaches like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Yanzhi Zhang , Zhaoxi Zhang , Haoxiang Guan , Yilin Cheng , Yitong Duan , Chen Wang , Yue Wang , Shuxin Zheng , Jiyan He

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Meng Cao , Lei Shu , Lei Yu , Yun Zhu , Nevan Wichers , Yinxiao Liu , Lei Meng

Solving a reinforcement learning (RL) problem poses two competing challenges: fitting a potentially discontinuous value function, and generalizing well to new observations. In this paper, we analyze the learning dynamics of temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Clare Lyle , Mark Rowland , Will Dabney , Marta Kwiatkowska , Yarin Gal