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Scaling test-time computation with reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a reliable path to improve large language models (LLM) reasoning ability. Yet, outcome-based reward often incentivizes models to be overconfident, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Liaoyaqi Wang , Chunsheng Zuo , William Jurayj , Benjamin Van Durme , Anqi Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

Alignment is a standard procedure to fine-tune pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to follow natural language instructions and serve as helpful AI assistants. We have observed, however, that the conventional alignment process fails to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Sheng-Chieh Lin , Luyu Gao , Barlas Oguz , Wenhan Xiong , Jimmy Lin , Wen-tau Yih , Xilun Chen

The majority of language model training builds on imitation learning. It covers pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and affects the starting conditions for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The simplicity and scalability…

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Yuhao Wang , Xiaopeng Li , Cheng Gong , Ziru Liu , Suiyun Zhang , Rui Liu , Xiangyu Zhao

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced in reasoning tasks through reinforcement learning (RL) optimization, achieving impressive capabilities across various challenging benchmarks. However, our empirical analysis reveals a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Junyi Li , Hwee Tou Ng

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) aligns Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, yet the underlying reward signals they internalize remain hidden, posing a critical challenge for interpretability and safety.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Nyal Patel , Matthieu Bou , Arjun Jagota , Satyapriya Krishna , Sonali Parbhoo

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have exhibited great potential in solving single-task sequential decision-making problems with high-dimensional observations and long horizons, but are known to be hard to generalize across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Boyuan Chen , Chuning Zhu , Pulkit Agrawal , Kaiqing Zhang , Abhishek Gupta

Large language models (LLMs) trained with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their underlying reward functions and decision-making processes remain opaque. This paper introduces…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jared Joselowitz , Ritam Majumdar , Arjun Jagota , Matthieu Bou , Nyal Patel , Satyapriya Krishna , Sonali Parbhoo

As large language models become smaller and more efficient, small reasoning models (SRMs) are crucial for enabling chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in resource-constrained settings. However, they are prone to faithfulness hallucinations,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Shuo Nie , Hexuan Deng , Chao Wang , Ruiyu Fang , Xuebo Liu , Shuangyong Song , Yu Li , Min Zhang , Xuelong Li

Reward function design and exploration time are arguably the biggest obstacles to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world. In many real-world tasks, designing a reward function takes considerable hand…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-06-14 Pierre Sermanet , Kelvin Xu , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently shown strong potential in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models and is now being actively extended to vision-language models (VLMs). However, existing RL applications in VLMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Yan Ma , Steffi Chern , Xuyang Shen , Yiran Zhong , Pengfei Liu

Function calling empowers large language models (LLMs) to interface with external tools, yet existing RL-based approaches suffer from misalignment between reasoning processes and tool-call decisions. We propose R2IF, a reasoning-aware RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Aijia Cheng , Kailong Wang , Ling Shi , Yongxin Zhao

Reinforcement learning provides an automated framework for learning behaviors from high-level reward specifications, but in practice the choice of reward function can be crucial for good results -- while in principle the reward only needs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Abhishek Gupta , Aldo Pacchiano , Yuexiang Zhai , Sham M. Kakade , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in aligning large language models with human preferences, inspiring the development of reward-centric diffusion reinforcement learning (RDRL) to achieve similar…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Kwanyoung Kim , Byeongsu Sim

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard paradigm for refining large language models (LLMs) beyond pre-training and instruction tuning. A prominent line of work is RL with verifiable rewards (RLVR), which leverages automatically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Bonan Zhang , Zhongqi Chen , Bowen Song , Qinya Li , Fan Wu , Guihai Chen

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for robotic path planning in uncertain environments. However, the control policies trained for an RL agent crucially depend on user-defined, state-based reward functions. Poorly designed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Anand Balakrishnan , Stefan Jakšić , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

Although outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) significantly advances the mathematical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), its reliance on computationally expensive ground-truth annotations imposes a severe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Zelin Zhang , Fei Cheng , Chenhui Chu

Reinforcement learning is a promising framework for solving control problems, but its use in practical situations is hampered by the fact that reward functions are often difficult to engineer. Specifying goals and tasks for autonomous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-22 Justin Fu , Anoop Korattikara , Sergey Levine , Sergio Guadarrama

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong math reasoning abilities through Reinforcement Learning with *Verifiable Rewards* (RLVR), many advanced mathematical problems are proof-based, with no guaranteed way to determine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Haotong Yang , Zitong Wang , Shijia Kang , Siqi Yang , Wenkai Yu , Xu Niu , Yike Sun , Yi Hu , Zhouchen Lin , Muhan Zhang