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Reward models (RMs) are critical for aligning Large Language Models via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). While Generative Reward Models (GRMs) achieve superior accuracy through chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, they incur…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Jiayun Wu , Peixu Hou , Shan Qu , Peng Zhang , Ning Gu , Tun Lu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework for solving sequential decision-making problems. In this work, we demonstrate that, surprisingly, RL emerges during the inference time of large language models (LLMs), a phenomenon we term…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Kefan Song , Amir Moeini , Peng Wang , Lei Gong , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang , Yanjun Qi

Despite recent progress, reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning of diffusion models often struggles with generalization, composability, and robustness against reward hacking. Recent studies have explored prompt refinement as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Suhyeon Lee , Jong Chul Ye

Reward models (RMs) have become essential for aligning large language models (LLMs), serving as scalable proxies for human evaluation in both training and inference. However, existing RMs struggle on knowledge-intensive and long-form tasks,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Ziyou Hu , Zhengliang Shi , Minghang Zhu , Haitao Li , Teng Sun , Pengjie Ren , Suzan Verberne , Zhaochun Ren

Large language models are increasingly used to support high-stakes decisions, potentially influencing who is granted bail or receives a loan. Naive chain-of-thought sampling can improve average decision accuracy, but has also been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Zara Hall , Melanie Subbiah , Thomas P Zollo , Kathleen McKeown , Richard Zemel

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

Reward modeling is essential for aligning large language models with human preferences through reinforcement learning. To provide accurate reward signals, a reward model (RM) should stimulate deep thinking and conduct interpretable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Xiusi Chen , Gaotang Li , Ziqi Wang , Bowen Jin , Cheng Qian , Yu Wang , Hongru Wang , Yu Zhang , Denghui Zhang , Tong Zhang , Hanghang Tong , Heng Ji

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

We explore a method for improving the performance of large language models through self-reflection and reinforcement learning. By incentivizing the model to generate better self-reflections when it answers incorrectly, we demonstrate that a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Shelly Bensal , Umar Jamil , Christopher Bryant , Melisa Russak , Kiran Kamble , Dmytro Mozolevskyi , Muayad Ali , Waseem AlShikh

Generating high-quality code remains a challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs). For the evolution of reasoning models on this task, reward models are a necessary intermediate step. These models judge outcomes or intermediate steps.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Jan Niklas Groeneveld , Xi Qin , Alexander Schaefer , Yaad Oren

Reinforcement Learning (RL) serves as a potent paradigm for enhancing reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet standard outcome-based approaches often suffer from reward sparsity and inefficient credit assignment. In this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Xiangwei Wang , Wei Wang , Ken Chen , Nanduni Nimalsiri , Saman Halgamuge

Reinforcement learning (RL) requires either manually specifying a reward function, which is often infeasible, or learning a reward model from a large amount of human feedback, which is often very expensive. We study a more sample-efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Juan Rocamonde , Victoriano Montesinos , Elvis Nava , Ethan Perez , David Lindner

Reinforcement learning (RL) often encounters delayed and sparse feedback in real-world applications, even with only episodic rewards. Previous approaches have made some progress in reward redistribution for credit assignment but still face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-10 Yun Qu , Yuhang Jiang , Boyuan Wang , Yixiu Mao , Cheems Wang , Chang Liu , Xiangyang Ji

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable performance across various NLP tasks. However, they often generate incorrect or hallucinated information, which hinders their practical applicability in real-world scenarios. Human feedback…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Wenhao Yu , Zhihan Zhang , Zhenwen Liang , Meng Jiang , Ashish Sabharwal

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…

Language models trained on large-scale datasets have been shown to learn features that encode abstract concepts such as factuality or intent. Such features are traditionally used for test-time monitoring or steering. We present an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Aaditya Vikram Prasad , Connor Watts , Jack Merullo , Dhruvil Gala , Owen Lewis , Thomas McGrath , Ekdeep Singh Lubana

Large pretrained models are showing increasingly better performance in reasoning and planning tasks across different modalities, opening the possibility to leverage them for complex sequential decision making problems. In this paper, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Martin Klissarov , Devon Hjelm , Alexander Toshev , Bogdan Mazoure

Reward models (RMs) play a critical role in enhancing the reasoning performance of LLMs. For example, they can provide training signals to finetune LLMs during reinforcement learning (RL) and help select the best answer from multiple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Qiyuan Liu , Hao Xu , Xuhong Chen , Wei Chen , Yee Whye Teh , Ning Miao

Reward modeling is crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, especially in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, current reward models mainly produce scalar scores and struggle to…

Search-augmented large language models (LLMs) trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved strong results on open-domain question answering (QA), but training still remains a significant challenge. The optimization is often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Yutao Xie , Nathaniel Thomas , Nicklas Hansen , Yang Fu , Li Erran Li , Xiaolong Wang