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Learning to rank (LTR) plays a crucial role in various Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. Although supervised LTR methods based on fine-grained relevance labels (e.g., document-level annotations) have achieved significant success, their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Yiteng Tu , Zhichao Xu , Tao Yang , Weihang Su , Yujia Zhou , Yiqun Liu , Fen Lin , Qin Liu , Qingyao Ai

Recent advancements in Generative Reward Models (GRMs) have demonstrated that scaling the length of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning considerably enhances the reliability of evaluation. However, current works predominantly rely on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Qiyuan Zhang , Yufei Wang , Tianhe Wu , Can Xu , Qingfeng Sun , Kai Zheng , Xue Liu , Chen Ma

We introduce SAIL-RL, a reinforcement learning (RL) post-training framework that enhances the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by teaching them when and how to think. Existing approaches are limited by…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Fangxun Shu , Yongjie Ye , Yue Liao , Zijian Kang , Weijie Yin , Jiacong Wang , Xiao Liang , Shuicheng Yan , Chao Feng

Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Cevahir Koprulu , Ufuk Topcu

Recent studies increasingly explore Large Language Models (LLMs) as a new paradigm for recommendation systems due to their scalability and world knowledge. However, existing work has three key limitations: (1) most efforts focus on…

Process reward models (PRMs) allow for fine-grained credit assignment in reinforcement learning (RL), and seemingly contrast with outcome reward models (ORMs), which assign a single reward to an entire trajectory. However, we provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Michael Sullivan , Alexander Koller

Improving the multi-step reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) with offline reinforcement learning (RL) is essential for quickly adapting them to complex tasks. While Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has shown promise in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Huaijie Wang , Shibo Hao , Hanze Dong , Shenao Zhang , Yilin Bao , Ziran Yang , Yi Wu

Mathematical reasoning is a key benchmark for large language models. Reinforcement learning is a standard post-training mechanism for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models, yet performance remains sensitive to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Arash Ahmadi , Sarah Sharif , Yaser , Banad

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training is a dominant approach for improving the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), yet growing evidence suggests that its gains arise primarily from distribution sharpening rather than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Xiaotong Ji , Rasul Tutunov , Matthieu Zimmer , Haitham Bou Ammar

Reinforcement Learning (RL) can directly enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models without extensive reliance on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this work, we revisit the traditional Policy Gradient (PG) mechanism and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Xiangxiang Chu , Hailang Huang , Xiao Zhang , Fei Wei , Yong Wang

High-quality chain-of-thought has demonstrated strong potential for unlocking the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, current paradigms typically treat the reasoning process as an indivisible sequence, lacking an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Yan Liu , Feng Zhang , Zhanyu Ma , Jun Xu , Jiuchong Gao , Jinghua Hao , Renqing He , Han Liu , Yangdong Deng

The shift toward interacting with frozen, "black-box" Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed prompt engineering from a heuristic exercise into a critical optimization challenge. We propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Krishna Sayana , Ketan Todi , Ambarish Jash

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a critical technique for enhancing LLM-based deep search agents. However, existing approaches primarily rely on binary outcome rewards, which fail to capture the comprehensiveness and factuality of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Jiajie Zhang , Xin Lv , Ling Feng , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

The application of reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) constitutes a rapidly advancing research area. While MLLMs extend Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Guanghao Zhou , Panjia Qiu , Cen Chen , Jie Wang , Zheming Yang , Jian Xu , Minghui Qiu

Process Reward Models (PRMs), which assign fine-grained scores to intermediate reasoning steps within a solution trajectory, have emerged as a promising approach to enhance the reasoning quality of Large Language Models (LLMs). However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Lingyin Zhang , Jun Gao , Xiaoxue Ren , Ziqiang Cao

Step-by-step verifiers -- also known as process reward models (PRMs) -- are a key ingredient for test-time scaling. PRMs require step-level supervision, making them expensive to train. This work aims to build data-efficient PRMs as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Muhammad Khalifa , Rishabh Agarwal , Lajanugen Logeswaran , Jaekyeom Kim , Hao Peng , Moontae Lee , Honglak Lee , Lu Wang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has markedly improved the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on tasks requiring multi-step reasoning. However, most RLVR pipelines rely on sparse outcome-based rewards,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Runquan Gui , Yafu Li , Xiaoye Qu , Ziyan Liu , Yeqiu Cheng , Yu Cheng

Inference-time scaling techniques have shown promise in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While recent research has primarily focused on training-time optimization, our work highlights inference-time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Jiachun Li , Pengfei Cao , Zhuoran Jin , Yubo Chen , Jiexin Xu , Huaijun Li , Xiaojian Jiang , Kang Liu , Jun Zhao

Process rewards have been widely used in deep reinforcement learning to improve training efficiency, reduce variance, and prevent reward hacking. In LLM reasoning, existing works also explore various solutions for learning effective process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Xian Wu , Kaijie Zhu , Ying Zhang , Lun Wang , Wenbo Guo

Vision--language models (VLMs) are increasingly aligned via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO)-style training. However, relying solely on terminal outcome rewards yields sparse credit assignment in multi-step reasoning, weakening the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Feiding , Yongkang Zhang , Yuhao Liao , Zijian Zeng , Chunzheng Zhu , Yaozong Zheng , Yafei Liu , Yeling Peng , Youwei Wang , Sibo Wang , Huiming Yang , Linglin Liao , Shunzhi Yang