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DEEPTHINK methods improve reasoning by generating, refining, and aggregating populations of candidate solutions, which enables strong performance on complex mathematical and scientific tasks. However, existing frameworks often lack reliable…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Rituraj Sharma , Weiyuan Chen , Noah Provenzano , Tu Vu

Reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome-based rewards has proven effective for improving large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, its success often depends on the base model occasionally sampling correct solutions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jatin Prakash , Anirudh Buvanesh

The capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are routinely evaluated by other LLMs trained to predict human preferences. This framework--known as LLM-as-a-judge--is highly scalable and relatively low cost. However, it is also vulnerable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Lisa Alazraki , Tan Yi-Chern , Jon Ander Campos , Maximilian Mozes , Marek Rei , Max Bartolo

Self-Rewarding Language Models propose an architecture in which the Large Language Models(LLMs) both generates responses and evaluates its own outputs via LLM-as-a-Judge prompting, dynamically improving its generative capabilities through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Yidong Wang , Xin Wang , Cunxiang Wang , Junfeng Fang , Qiufeng Wang , Jianing Chu , Xuran Meng , Shuxun Yang , Libo Qin , Yue Zhang , Wei Ye , Shikun Zhang

Recent progress in large language models (LLM) found chain-of-thought prompting strategies to improve the reasoning ability of LLMs by encouraging problem solving through multiple steps. Therefore, subsequent research aimed to integrate the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Ting-Ruen Wei , Haowei Liu , Xuyang Wu , Yi Fang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to hallucination, especially during multi-hop and reasoning-intensive tasks such as mathematical problem solving. While Outcome Reward Models verify only final answers, Process Reward Models (PRMs)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Tej Deep Pala , Panshul Sharma , Amir Zadeh , Chuan Li , Soujanya Poria

Outcome-reward reinforcement learning (RL) has proven effective at improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, standard RL assigns credit only at the level of the final answer, penalizing entire reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Matthew Y. R. Yang , Hao Bai , Ian Wu , Gene Yang , Amrith Setlur , Aviral Kumar

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in open-ended text generation tasks. However, the inherent open-ended nature of these tasks implies that there is always room for improvement in the quality of model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Ziqi Wang , Le Hou , Tianjian Lu , Yuexin Wu , Yunxuan Li , Hongkun Yu , Heng Ji

Reward modeling (RM), which captures human preferences to align large language models (LLMs), is increasingly employed in tasks such as model finetuning, response filtering, and ranking. However, due to the inherent complexity of human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Pankayaraj Pathmanathan , Furong Huang

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on reasoning benchmarks via reinforcement learning requires a specific reward function, often binary, for each benchmark. This comes with two potential limitations: the need to design the reward, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Ariel Kwiatkowski , Natasha Butt , Ismail Labiad , Julia Kempe , Yann Ollivier

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Meng Cao , Lei Shu , Lei Yu , Yun Zhu , Nevan Wichers , Yinxiao Liu , Lei Meng

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks. However, their ability to generate human-like text has raised concerns about potential misuse. This underscores the need for reliable and effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Runheng Liu , Heyan Huang , Xingchen Xiao , Zhijing Wu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to follow instructions with various constraints. Despite the encouraging results, RL improvement inevitably relies on sampling successful, high-quality…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Kongcheng Zhang , Qi Yao , Shunyu Liu , Wenjian Zhang , Min Cen , Yang Zhou , Wenkai Fang , Yiru Zhao , Baisheng Lai , Mingli Song

Small language models (SLMs) enable low-cost, private, on-device inference, but they often fail on problems that require specialized domain knowledge or multi-step reasoning. Existing approaches for improving reasoning either rely on scale…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Kenan Alkiek , David Jurgens , Vinod Vydiswaran

Reward models are crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and intentions. Existing approaches follow either Generative (GRMs) or Discriminative (DRMs) paradigms, yet both suffer from limitations: GRMs typically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Longze Chen , Lu Wang , Renke Shan , Ze Gong , Run Luo , Jiaming Li , Jing Luo , Qiyao Wang , Min Yang

Distilling large language models (LLMs) typically involves transferring the teacher model's responses through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, this approach neglects the potential to distill both data (output content) and reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Yudi Zhang , Lu Wang , Meng Fang , Yali Du , Chenghua Huang , Jun Wang , Qingwei Lin , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Dongmei Zhang , Saravan Rajmohan , Qi Zhang

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit advanced reasoning ability, conventional alignment remains largely dominated by outcome reward models (ORMs) that judge only final answers. Process Reward Models(PRMs) address this gap by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Congmin Zheng , Jiachen Zhu , Zhuoying Ou , Yuxiang Chen , Kangning Zhang , Rong Shan , Zeyu Zheng , Mengyue Yang , Jianghao Lin , Yong Yu , Weinan Zhang

Different from its counterpart outcome reward models (ORMs), which evaluate the entire responses, a process reward model (PRM) scores a reasoning trajectory step by step, providing denser and more fine grained rewards. However, training a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-04 Lifan Yuan , Wendi Li , Huayu Chen , Ganqu Cui , Ning Ding , Kaiyan Zhang , Bowen Zhou , Zhiyuan Liu , Hao Peng

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse natural language tasks, yet the reward models employed for aligning LLMs often encounter challenges of reward hacking, where the approaches predominantly rely on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Biao Liu , Ning Xu , Junming Yang , Hao Xu , Xin Geng

In this work, we introduce PIPER: Primitive-Informed Preference-based Hierarchical reinforcement learning via Hindsight Relabeling, a novel approach that leverages preference-based learning to learn a reward model, and subsequently uses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Utsav Singh , Wesley A. Suttle , Brian M. Sadler , Vinay P. Namboodiri , Amrit Singh Bedi