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Large Language Models (LLMs) have made substantial strides in structured tasks through Reinforcement Learning (RL), demonstrating proficiency in mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, applying RL in broader domains like…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Hao Sun , Yunyi Shen , Jean-Francois Ton , Mihaela van der Schaar

Reward models have been increasingly critical for improving the reasoning capability of LLMs. Existing research has shown that a well-trained reward model can substantially improve model performances at inference time via search. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Jiaxuan Gao , Shusheng Xu , Wenjie Ye , Weilin Liu , Chuyi He , Wei Fu , Zhiyu Mei , Guangju Wang , Yi Wu

In this work, we present a simple yet theoretically motivated improvement to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for the Large Language Model (LLM), addressing its limited generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). Through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yongliang Wu , Yizhou Zhou , Zhou Ziheng , Yingzhe Peng , Xinyu Ye , Xinting Hu , Wenbo Zhu , Lu Qi , Ming-Hsuan Yang , Xu Yang

Modern machine learning is trained by stochastic gradient descent (SGD), whose performance critically depends on how the learning rate (LR) is adjusted and decreased over time. Yet existing LR regimes may be intricate, or need to tune one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Zhuang Yang

Evolution Strategies (ES) has recently emerged as a competitive alternative to reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model (LLM) fine-tuning, offering advantages through simplicity, scalability, and inference-only training.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Kajetan Schweighofer , Conor F. Hayes , Roberto Dailey , Risto Miikkulainen , Xin Qiu

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has markedly enhanced the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Its success, however, largely depends on strong base models with rich world knowledge, yielding only modest…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Yongxin Guo , Wenbo Deng , Zhenglin Cheng , Xiaoying Tang

Test-time scaling (TTS) for large language models (LLMs) has thus far fallen into two largely separate paradigms: (1) reinforcement learning (RL) methods that optimize sparse outcome-based rewards, yet suffer from instability and low sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Can Jin , Yang Zhou , Qixin Zhang , Hongwu Peng , Di Zhang , Zihan Dong , Marco Pavone , Ligong Han , Zhang-Wei Hong , Tong Che , Dimitris N. Metaxas

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Typical RL methods optimize under an overall sequence reward, which can lead to a suboptimal learning process. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Yanshi Li , Shaopan Xiong , Gengru Chen , Xiaoyang Li , Yijia Luo , Xingyuan Bu , Yingshui Tan , Wenbo Su , Bo Zheng

Enhancing future wireless networks presents a significant challenge for networking systems due to diverse user demands and the emergence of 6G technology. While reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework, it often encounters…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Jie Zheng , Ruichen Zhang , Dusit Niyato , Haijun Zhang , Jiacheng Wang , Hongyang Du , Jiawen Kang , Zehui Xiong

In spite of advances in understanding lazy training, recent work attributes the practical success of deep learning to the rich regime with complex inductive bias. In this paper, we study rich regime training empirically with benchmark…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Xinyan Li , Arindam Banerjee

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across diverse natural language processing benchmarks. However, the escalating scale of model parameters imposes prohibitive memory overheads during training,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Ziqing Wen , Ping Luo , Jiahuan Wang , Kun Yuan , Dongsheng Li , Tao Sun

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is critical to recent advances in generative artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is widely applied to achieve this objective. A key step in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-03 Pangpang Liu , Chengchun Shi , Will Wei Sun

Adaptive optimization algorithms, particularly Adam and its variant AdamW, are fundamental components of modern deep learning. However, their training dynamics lack comprehensive theoretical understanding, with limited insight into why…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Rhys Gould , Hidenori Tanaka

Adam is a popular and widely used adaptive gradient method in deep learning, which has also received tremendous focus in theoretical research. However, most existing theoretical work primarily analyzes its full-batch version, which differs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Xuan Tang , Han Zhang , Yuan Cao , Difan Zou

Adaptive gradient methods, e.g. \textsc{Adam}, have achieved tremendous success in machine learning. Scaling the learning rate element-wisely by a certain form of second moment estimate of gradients, such methods are able to attain rapid…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Yizhou Wang , Yue Kang , Can Qin , Huan Wang , Yi Xu , Yulun Zhang , Yun Fu

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been proven essential for tuning large language models (LLMs), it can lead to reward over-optimization (ROO). Existing approaches address ROO by adding KL regularization, requiring computationally…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Mathieu Rita , Florian Strub , Rahma Chaabouni , Paul Michel , Emmanuel Dupoux , Olivier Pietquin

Adaptive first-order optimizers are fundamental tools in deep learning, although they may suffer from poor generalization due to the nonuniform gradient scaling. In this work, we propose AdamL, a novel variant of the Adam optimizer, that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-27 Lu Xia , Stefano Massei

The recent DeepSeek-R1 release has demonstrated the immense potential of reinforcement learning (RL) in enhancing the general reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While DeepSeek-R1 and other follow-up work primarily focus…

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems empower large language models (LLMs) to access external knowledge during inference. Recent advances have enabled LLMs to act as search agents via reinforcement learning (RL), improving…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Pengcheng Jiang , Xueqiang Xu , Jiacheng Lin , Jinfeng Xiao , Zifeng Wang , Jimeng Sun , Jiawei Han

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is used extensively in Autonomous Systems (AS) as it enables learning at runtime without the need for a model of the environment or predefined actions. However, most applications of RL in AS, such as those based…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Juan C. Rosero , Ivana Dusparic , Nicolás Cardozo