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This work identifies the Energy Loss Phenomenon in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and its connection to reward hacking. Specifically, energy loss in the final layer of a Large Language Model (LLM) gradually increases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Yuchun Miao , Sen Zhang , Liang Ding , Yuqi Zhang , Lefei Zhang , Dacheng Tao

The dominant paradigm for training large reasoning models starts with pre-training using next-token prediction loss on vast amounts of data. Reinforcement learning, while powerful in scaling reasoning, is introduced only as the very last…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have recently shown promise in solving complex math problems when optimized with Reinforcement Learning (RL). But conventional approaches rely on outcome-only rewards that provide sparse feedback, resulting in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Tao He , Rongchuan Mu , Lizi Liao , Yixin Cao , Ming Liu , Bing Qin

LLM post-training typically propagates task gradients through the full depth of the model. Although this end-to-end structure is simple and general, it couples task adaptation to full-depth activation storage, long-range backward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Hengyu Shi , Tianyang Han , Peizhe Wang , Zhiling Wang , Xu Yang , Junhao Su

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a lightweight variant of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Chen Wang , Lai Wei , Yanzhi Zhang , Chenyang Shao , Zedong Dan , Weiran Huang , Yuzhi Zhang , Yue Wang

Entropy regularization is a standard technique in reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance exploration, yet it yields negligible effects or even degrades performance in Large Language Models (LLMs). We attribute this failure to the cumulative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Chao Huang , Yujing Lu , Quangang Li , Shenghe Wang , Yan Wang , Yueyang Zhang , Long Xia , Jiashu Zhao , Zhiyuan Sun , Daiting Shi , Tingwen Liu

Reinforcement Learning has demonstrated substantial improvements in the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), exhibiting significant applicability across various domains. Recent research has identified that tokens within LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Haomin Zhuang , Yujun Zhou , Taicheng Guo , Yue Huang , Fangxu Liu , Kai Song , Xiangliang Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with knowledge intensive NLP tasks, such as answering "Who won the latest World Cup?" because the knowledge they learn during training may be insufficient or outdated. Conditioning generation on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Matthew Finlayson , Ilia Kulikov , Daniel M. Bikel , Barlas Oguz , Xilun Chen , Aasish Pappu

There is a family of label modification approaches including self and non-self label correction (LC), and output regularisation. They are widely used for training robust deep neural networks (DNNs), but have not been mathematically and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-07 Xinshao Wang , Yang Hua , Elyor Kodirov , Sankha Subhra Mukherjee , David A. Clifton , Neil M. Robertson

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 with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite its efficacy, RLVR faces a meta-learning bottleneck: it lacks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Shiting Huang , Zecheng Li , Yu Zeng , Qingnan Ren , Zhen Fang , Qisheng Su , Kou Shi , Lin Chen , Zehui Chen , Feng Zhao

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (\textbf{RLHF}) has emerged as a dominant approach for aligning LLM outputs with human preferences. Inspired by the success of RLHF, we study the performance of multiple algorithms that learn from…

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) are trained to in-fill positions in randomly masked sequences, in contrast to next-token prediction models. Discussions around MDLMs focus on two benefits: (1) any-order decoding and 2) multi-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Zachary Horvitz , Raghav Singhal , Hao Zou , Carles Domingo-Enrich , Zhou Yu , Rajesh Ranganath , Kathleen McKeown

Pre-trained Transformer language models (LM) have become go-to text representation encoders. Prior research fine-tunes deep LMs to encode text sequences such as sentences and passages into single dense vector representations for efficient…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-22 Luyu Gao , Jamie Callan

Latent learning, classically theorized by Tolman, shows that biological agents (e.g., rats) can acquire internal representations of their environment without rewards, enabling rapid adaptation once rewards are introduced. In contrast, from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jian Xiong , Jingbo Zhou , Zihan Zhou , Yixiong Xiao , Le Zhang , Jingyong Ye , Rui Qian , Yang Zhou , Dejing Dou

Reinforcement learning (RL) is often credited with improving language model reasoning and generalization at the expense of degrading memorized knowledge. We challenge this narrative by observing that RL-enhanced models consistently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Renfei Zhang , Manasa Kaniselvan , Niloofar Mireshghallah

Recent advancements in large reasoning models (LRMs) have significantly enhanced language models' capabilities in complex problem-solving by emulating human-like deliberative thinking. However, these models often exhibit overthinking (i.e.,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Weixiang Zhao , Jiahe Guo , Yang Deng , Xingyu Sui , Yulin Hu , Yanyan Zhao , Wanxiang Che , Bing Qin , Tat-Seng Chua , Ting Liu

Looped language models (LoopLMs) perform iterative latent computation to refine internal representations, offering a promising alternative to explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, existing reinforcement learning (RL) paradigms…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Guo Tang , Shixin Jiang , Heng Chang , Nuo Chen , Yuhan Li , Huiming Fan , Jia Li , Ming Liu , Bing Qin

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable success on reasoning-intensive tasks such as mathematics and programming. However, their enhanced reasoning capabilities do not necessarily translate to improved safety performance-and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Zhexin Zhang , Xian Qi Loye , Victor Shea-Jay Huang , Junxiao Yang , Qi Zhu , Shiyao Cui , Fei Mi , Lifeng Shang , Yingkang Wang , Hongning Wang , Minlie Huang

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has fundamentally transformed natural language processing, making them indispensable across domains ranging from conversational systems to scientific exploration. However, their pre-trained…