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As language models (LMs) demonstrate their capabilities in various fields, their application to tasks requiring multi-round interactions has become increasingly popular. These tasks usually have complex dynamics, so supervised fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Runlong Zhou , Simon S. Du , Beibin Li

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

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories has become a pivotal phase in building large reasoning models. However, how CoT trajectories from different sources influence the generalization performance of models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Zhaoyi Li , Xiangyu Xi , Zhengyu Chen , Wei Wang , Gangwei Jiang , Ranran Shen , Linqi Song , Ying Wei , Defu Lian

While machine learning models become more capable in discriminative tasks at scale, their ability to overcome biases introduced by training data has come under increasing scrutiny. Previous results suggest that there are two extremes of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Nathan Stromberg , Christos Thrampoulidis , Lalitha Sankar

Post-training with Reinforcement Learning (RL) has substantially improved reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) via test-time scaling. However, extending this paradigm to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) through verbose rationales yields limited…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Bangzheng Li , Jianmo Ni , Chen Qu , Ian Miao , Liu Yang , Xingyu Fu , Muhao Chen , Derek Zhiyuan Cheng

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard technique for post-training diffusion-based image synthesis models, as it enables learning from reward signals to explicitly improve desirable aspects such as image quality and prompt…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-16 David McAllister , Miika Aittala , Tero Karras , Janne Hellsten , Angjoo Kanazawa , Timo Aila , Samuli Laine

Current LLM post-training methods optimize complete reasoning trajectories through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by outcome-based Reinforcement Learning (RL). While effective, a closer examination reveals a fundamental gap: this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Shaojie Wang , Liang Zhang

Continual post-training (CPT) is a popular and effective technique for adapting foundation models like multimodal large language models to specific and ever-evolving downstream tasks. While existing research has primarily concentrated on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Song Lai , Haohan Zhao , Rong Feng , Changyi Ma , Wenzhuo Liu , Hongbo Zhao , Xi Lin , Dong Yi , Qingfu Zhang , Hongbin Liu , Gaofeng Meng , Fei Zhu

Meta Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL) has seen substantial advancements recently. In particular, off-policy methods were developed to improve the data efficiency of Meta-RL techniques. \textit{Probabilistic embeddings for actor-critic RL}…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Lu Wen , Songan Zhang , H. Eric Tseng , Baljeet Singh , Dimitar Filev , Huei Peng

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling self-improvement in large language models (LLMs). However, existing unsupervised RL-based methods often lack the capacity to adapt to the model's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yiming Huang , Zhenbo Shi , Xin-Cheng Wen , Jichuan Zeng , Cuiyun Gao , Peiyi Han , Chuanyi Liu

Post-training algorithms such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) are widely used to adapt (multimodal) large language models to downstream tasks. While effective at task adaptation, their impact on retaining…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Zhihao Zhang , Qiaole Dong , Qi Zhang , Jun Zhao , Enyu Zhou , Zhiheng Xi , Senjie Jin , Xiaoran Fan , Yuhao Zhou , Mingqi Wu , Yanwei Fu , Tao Ji , Tao Gui , Xuanjing Huang , Kai Chen

Previous study suggest that powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) trained with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) only refines reasoning path without improving the reasoning capacity in math tasks while…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Ran Li , Shimin Di , Yuchen Liu , Chen Jing , Yu Qiu , Lei Chen

Large language models (LLMs) solve reasoning problems by first generating a rationale and then answering. We formalize reasoning as a latent variable model and derive a reward-based filtered expectation-maximization (FEM) objective for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Junghyun Lee , Branislav Kveton , Anup Rao , Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Ryan A. Rossi , Sunav Choudhary , Alexa Siu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated its potential to improve the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). One major limitation of most existing Reinforcement Finetuning (RFT) methods is that they are on-policy RL in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Jing Liang , Hongyao Tang , Yi Ma , Jinyi Liu , Yan Zheng , Shuyue Hu , Lei Bai , Jianye Hao

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks via full fine-tuning is increasingly impractical due to its computational and memory demands. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approaches such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Jing Gao , Zhong-Yi Lu , Pan Zhang , Ze-Feng Gao

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various tasks but face deployment challenges due to their massive computational demands. While post-training pruning methods like SparseGPT and Wanda can effectively…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Qiao Xiao , Alan Ansell , Boqian Wu , Lu Yin , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Shiwei Liu , Decebal Constantin Mocanu

The in-context learning (ICL) capability of large language models (LLMs) enables them to perform challenging tasks using provided demonstrations. However, ICL is highly sensitive to the ordering of demonstrations, leading to instability in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Liang Chen , Li Shen , Yang Deng , Xiaoyan Zhao , Bin Liang , Kam-Fai Wong

Post-training language models (LMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) can enhance their complex reasoning capabilities without supervised fine-tuning, as demonstrated by DeepSeek-R1-Zero. However, effectively utilizing RL for LMs requires…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise as educational tutors, yet effective tutoring requires more than solving problems: it must provide progressive Socratic guidance and balance multiple pedagogical objectives across multi-turn…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Qikai Chang , Zhenrong Zhang , Linbo Chen , Pengfei Hu , Jianshu Zhang , Youhui Guo , Jun Du

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…