Related papers: Small Reward Models via Backward Inference

Recent work on reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has shown that large language models (LLMs) can be substantially improved using outcome-level verification signals, such as unit tests for code or exact-match checks for…

The emergence of LM-based judging reward modeling, represented by generative reward models, has successfully made reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF) efficient and scalable. To further advance this paradigm, we propose a core…

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…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for complex reasoning tasks with clear correctness signals such as math and coding. However, extending it to real-world reasoning tasks is challenging, as evaluation…

We study self-rewarding reasoning large language models (LLMs), which can simultaneously generate step-by-step reasoning and evaluate the correctness of their outputs during the inference time-without external feedback. This integrated…

Recently, rubrics have been used to guide LLM judges in capturing subjective, nuanced, multi-dimensional human preferences, and have been extended from evaluation to reward signals for reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). However, rubric…

Chain-of-thought explanations are widely used to inspect the decision process of large language models (LLMs) and to evaluate the trustworthiness of model outputs, making them important for effective collaboration between LLMs and humans.…

Effectively exploring the environment is a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). We address this challenge by defining a novel intrinsic reward based on a foundation model, such as contrastive language image pretraining (CLIP),…

The increasing emphasis on privacy and data security has driven the adoption of federated learning, a decentralized approach to train machine learning models without sharing raw data. Prompt learning, which fine-tunes prompt embeddings of…

Using learned reward functions (LRFs) as a means to solve sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) tasks has yielded some steady progress in task-complexity through the years. In this work, we question whether today's LRFs are best-suited…

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…

Dense process rewards have proven a more effective alternative to the sparse outcome-level rewards in the inference-time scaling of large language models (LLMs), particularly in tasks requiring complex multi-step reasoning. While dense…

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…

The CLIP model has established itself as a cornerstone of large-scale retrieval systems. However, its performance often degrades under distributional shifts such as multilingual, long-form, or multimodal queries. To avoid the prohibitive…

Reward models play a critical role in guiding large language models toward outputs that align with human expectations. However, an open challenge remains in effectively utilizing test-time compute to enhance reward model performance. In…

In aligning large language models (LLMs), reward models have played an important role, but are standardly trained as discriminative models and rely only on labeled human preference data. In this paper, we explore methods that train reward…

Training reliable tool-augmented agents remains a significant challenge, largely due to the difficulty of credit assignment in multi-step reasoning. While process-level reward models offer a promising direction, existing LLM-based judges…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…

Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles with reward misalignment, where agents optimize given rewards but fail to exhibit the desired behaviors. This arises when the reward function incentivizes proxy behaviors misaligned with the true…

Offline imitation learning (offline IL) enables training effective policies without requiring explicit reward annotations. Recent approaches attempt to estimate rewards for unlabeled datasets using a small set of expert demonstrations.…