Related papers: READY: Reward Discovery for Meta-Black-Box Optimiz…

Large Transformer models are capable of implementing a plethora of so-called in-context learning algorithms. These include gradient descent, classification, sequence completion, transformation, and improvement. In this work, we investigate…

In online reinforcement learning (RL), efficient exploration remains particularly challenging in high-dimensional environments with sparse rewards. In low-dimensional environments, where tabular parameterization is possible, count-based…

We introduce Meta-Reasoning Prompting (MRP), a novel and efficient system prompting method for large language models (LLMs) inspired by human meta-reasoning. Traditional in-context learning-based reasoning techniques, such as…

Designing optimization approaches, whether heuristic or meta-heuristic, usually demands extensive manual intervention and has difficulty generalizing across diverse problem domains. The combination of Large Language Models (LLMs) and…

The pursuit of universal black-box optimization (BBO) algorithms is a longstanding goal. However, unlike domains such as language or vision, where scaling structured data has driven generalization, progress in offline BBO remains hindered…

The no free lunch theorem states that no model is better suited to every problem. A question that arises from this is how to design methods that propose optimizers tailored to specific problems achieving state-of-the-art performance. This…

This paper investigates Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in long-horizon, multi-turn scenarios. Although RL algorithms such as Group Relative Policy…

Large language models (LLMs) have recently advanced in reasoning when optimized with reinforcement learning (RL) under verifiable rewards. Existing methods primarily rely on outcome-based supervision to strengthen internal LLM reasoning,…

Recently, test-time scaling has garnered significant attention from the research community, largely due to the substantial advancements of the o1 model released by OpenAI. By allocating more computational resources during the inference…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been shown to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), enabling the development of large reasoning models (LRMs). However, LRMs such as DeepSeek-R1 and…

Reward modeling (RM), which captures human preferences to align large language models (LLMs), is increasingly employed in tasks such as model finetuning, response filtering, and ranking. However, due to the inherent complexity of human…

Reward models (RMs) guide the alignment of large language models (LLMs), steering them toward behaviors preferred by humans. Evaluating RMs is the key to better aligning LLMs. However, the current evaluation of RMs may not directly…

When gradient-based methods are impractical, black-box optimization (BBO) provides a valuable alternative. However, BBO often struggles with high-dimensional problems and limited trial budgets. In this work, we propose a novel approach…

Despite the success of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) in aligning language models with human values, reward hacking, also termed reward overoptimization, remains a critical challenge. This issue primarily arises from…

The effective training of Large Language Models (LLMs) for function calling faces a critical challenge: balancing exploration of complex reasoning paths with stable policy optimization. Standard methods like Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive success in various applications. However, these models are often not well aligned with human intents, which calls for additional treatments on them; that is, the alignment problem. To make…

Language models must now generalize out of the box to novel environments and work inside inference-scaling search procedures, such as AlphaEvolve, that select rollouts with a variety of task-specific reward functions. Unfortunately, the…

We deploy large language models (LLMs) as business development (BD) agents for persuasive price negotiation in online travel agencies (OTAs). The agent must follow a multi-stage Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and strict guardrails (no…

Reward models play a critical role in guiding large language models toward outputs that align with human expectations. However, an open challenge remains in effectively utilizing test-time compute to enhance reward model performance. In…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as effective surrogate models and candidate generators within global optimization frameworks for expensive blackbox functions. Despite promising results, LLM-based methods often struggle in…