English
Related papers

Related papers: Beyond Token-Level Policy Gradients for Complex Re…

200 papers

Prompt quality plays a central role in controlling the behavior, reliability, and reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), particularly for smaller open-source instruction-tuned models that depend heavily on explicit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Prith Sharma , Austin Z. Henley

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning abilities via Chain-of-Thought (CoT), but their token-level generation encourages local decisions and lacks global planning, often leading to redundant or inaccurate reasoning.…

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning abilities in solving complex real-world problems. Yet, the internal mechanisms driving these complex reasoning behaviors remain opaque. Existing interpretability approaches targeting…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Changming Li , Kaixing Zhang , Haoyun Xu , Yingdong Shi , Zheng Zhang , Kaitao Song , Kan Ren

Large language models often solve complex reasoning tasks more effectively with Chain-of-Thought (CoT), but at the cost of long, low-bandwidth token sequences. Humans, by contrast, often reason softly by maintaining a distribution over…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Yao Tang , Li Dong , Yaru Hao , Qingxiu Dong , Furu Wei , Jiatao Gu

Advanced models such as OpenAI o1 exhibit impressive problem-solving capabilities through step-by-step reasoning. However, they may still falter on more complex problems, making errors that disrupt their reasoning paths. We attribute this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Yew Ken Chia , Guizhen Chen , Weiwen Xu , Luu Anh Tuan , Soujanya Poria , Lidong Bing

Reward-based alignment methods for large language models (LLMs) face two key limitations: vulnerability to reward hacking, where models exploit flaws in the reward signal; and reliance on brittle, labor-intensive prompt engineering when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Zae Myung Kim , Chanwoo Park , Vipul Raheja , Suin Kim , Dongyeop Kang

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in various domains, showing impressive potential on different tasks. Recently, reasoning LLMs have been proposed to improve the \textit{reasoning} or \textit{thinking} capabilities of LLMs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Jiahao Yu , Zelei Cheng , Xian Wu , Xinyu Xing

We propose reinforcement learning (RL) strategies tailored for reasoning in large language models (LLMs) under strict memory and compute limits, with a particular focus on compatibility with LoRA fine-tuning. Building on early policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Alan Lee , Harry Tong

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities in well-defined problems with clear solutions, such as mathematics and coding. However, they still struggle with complex real-world scenarios like business…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Xiaoqian Liu , Ke Wang , Yongbin Li , Yuchuan Wu , Wentao Ma , Aobo Kong , Fei Huang , Jianbin Jiao , Junge Zhang

Policy optimization for large language models often suffers from sparse reward signals in multi-step reasoning tasks. Critic-free methods like GRPO assign a single normalized outcome reward to all tokens, providing limited guidance for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Ruiyi Ding , Yongxuan Lv , Xianhui Meng , Jiahe Song , Chao Wang , Chen Jiang , Yuan Cheng

Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models effectively using reinforcement learning (RL) remains a crucial challenge. Existing approaches primarily adopt two contrasting advantage estimation granularities: token-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Yiran Guo , Lijie Xu , Jie Liu , Dan Ye , Shuang Qiu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in English mathematical reasoning, yet a significant performance disparity persists in multilingual contexts, largely attributed to deficiencies in language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Xu Huang , Zhejian Lai , Zixian Huang , Jiajun Chen , Shujian Huang

In the domain of complex reasoning tasks, such as mathematical reasoning, recent advancements have proposed the use of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to suppress output of dispreferred responses, thereby enhancing the long-chain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Weibin Liao , Xu Chu , Yasha Wang

A core challenge in policy optimization in competitive Markov decision processes is the design of efficient optimization methods with desirable convergence and stability properties. To tackle this, we propose competitive policy optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Manish Prajapat , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Alexander Liniger , Yisong Yue , Anima Anandkumar

Large language models have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities in complex tasks through tool integration, which is typically framed as a Markov Decision Process and optimized with trajectory-level RL algorithms such as GRPO. However,…

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have popularized test-time scaling, where models generate additional reasoning tokens before producing final answers. These approaches have demonstrated significant performance improvements on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Wenxun Wu , Yuanyang Li , Guhan Chen , Linyue Wang , Hongyang Chen

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shifted from explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to more efficient latent reasoning, where intermediate thoughts are represented as vectors rather than text. However, latent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Wengao Ye , Yan Liang , Lianlei Shan

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift from superficial instruction following to rigorous long-horizon reasoning. While Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a pivotal mechanism for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Xuan Xie , Xuan Wang , Wenjie Wang , Shuai Chen , Wei Lin

Recently, Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have shown promising potential across vision, language, and cross-modal generation. However, a notable discrepancy exists between their training and inference procedures. In particular, MDM inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Renping Zhou , Zanlin Ni , Tianyi Chen , Zeyu Liu , Yang Yue , Yulin Wang , Yuxuan Wang , Jingshu Liu , Gao Huang

We introduce a novel policy learning method that integrates analytical gradients from differentiable environments with the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. To incorporate analytical gradients into the PPO framework, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Sanghyun Son , Laura Yu Zheng , Ryan Sullivan , Yi-Ling Qiao , Ming C. Lin