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Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in training large language models (LLMs) for preventing unexpected outputs, eg reducing harmfulness and errors. However, existing RL methods mostly adopt the instance-level reward, which is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Zhipeng Chen , Kun Zhou , Wayne Xin Zhao , Junchen Wan , Fuzheng Zhang , Di Zhang , Ji-Rong Wen

Large language models (LLMs) excel at many supervised tasks but often struggle with structured reasoning in unfamiliar settings. This discrepancy suggests that standard fine-tuning pipelines may instill narrow, domain-specific heuristics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Zhen Hao Wong , Jingwen Deng , Runming He , Zirong Chen , Qijie You , Hejun Dong , Hao Liang , Chengyu Shen , Bin Cui , Wentao Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems can be challenging without well-shaped rewards. Prior work on provably efficient RL methods generally proposes to address this issue with dedicated exploration strategies. However, another way to tackle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Qiyang Li , Yuexiang Zhai , Yi Ma , Sergey Levine

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

Tabular data serves as the backbone of modern data analysis and scientific research. While Large Language Models (LLMs) fine-tuned via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) have significantly improved natural language interaction with such…

Designing rewards for Reinforcement Learning (RL) is challenging because it needs to convey the desired task, be efficient to optimize, and be easy to compute. The latter is particularly problematic when applying RL to robotics, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-28 Yiming Ding , Carlos Florensa , Mariano Phielipp , Pieter Abbeel

Applying reinforcement learning (RL) to sparse reward domains is notoriously challenging due to insufficient guiding signals. Common RL techniques for addressing such domains include (1) learning from demonstrations and (2) curriculum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-29 Vaibhav Bajaj , Guni Sharon , Peter Stone

Reinforcement learning exhibits potential in enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models, yet it is hard to scale for the low sample efficiency during the rollout phase. Existing methods attempt to improve efficiency by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Deyang Kong , Qi Guo , Xiangyu Xi , Wei Wang , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai , Shikun Zhang , Wei Ye

We study the problem of sample efficient reinforcement learning, where prior data such as demonstrations are provided for initialization in lieu of a dense reward signal. A natural approach is to incorporate an imitation learning objective,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Perry Dong , Alec M. Lessing , Annie S. Chen , Chelsea Finn

As a paradigm for sequential decision making in unknown environments, reinforcement learning (RL) has received a flurry of attention in recent years. However, the explosion of model complexity in emerging applications and the presence of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-22 Yuejie Chi , Yuxin Chen , Yuting Wei

We present an implementation of model-based online reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous domains with deterministic transitions that is specifically designed to achieve low sample complexity. To achieve low sample complexity, since the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-02-01 Tobias Jung , Peter Stone

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, existing methods suffer from an exploration dilemma: the sharply peaked initial…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yuhua Jiang , Jiawei Huang , Yufeng Yuan , Xin Mao , Yu Yue , Qianchuan Zhao , Lin Yan

Until recently, the success of large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) has primarily relied on billion-sample datasets, posing a significant barrier to progress. Latest works have begun to close this gap by improving supervision quality,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Deen Dayal Mohan , Hossein Souri , Vitali Petsiuk , Juhong Min , Gopal Sharma , Luowei Zhou , Suren Kumar

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in text generation to alleviate the exposure bias issue or to utilize non-parallel datasets. The reward function plays an important role in making RL training successful. However, previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-19 Yongchang Hao , Yuxin Liu , Lili Mou

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for enhancing model reasoning. However, existing RL methods like GRPO typically rely on unstructured self-sampling to fit scalar rewards, often producing inefficient rollouts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Jinyang Wu , Chonghua Liao , Mingkuan Feng , Shuai Zhang , Zhengqi Wen , Haoran Luo , Ling Yang , Huazhe Xu , Jianhua Tao

We propose FlowRL: matching the full reward distribution via flow balancing instead of maximizing rewards in large language model (LLM) reinforcement learning (RL). Recent advanced reasoning models adopt reward-maximizing methods (\eg, PPO…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a predominant technique to align language models (LMs) with human preferences or promote outputs which are deemed to be desirable by a given reward function. Standard RL approaches optimize average…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Stephen Zhao , Aidan Li , Rob Brekelmans , Roger Grosse

The effective training of Large Language Models (LLMs) for function calling faces a critical challenge: balancing exploration of complex reasoning paths with stable policy optimization. Standard methods like Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)…

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with problems that require multi-step reasoning. For small-scale open-source models, Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) fails when correct solutions are rarely sampled even…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yihe Deng , I-Hung Hsu , Jun Yan , Zifeng Wang , Rujun Han , Gufeng Zhang , Yanfei Chen , Wei Wang , Tomas Pfister , Chen-Yu Lee

Although reinforcement learning (RL) can provide reliable solutions in many settings, practitioners are often wary of the discrepancies between the RL solution and their status quo procedures. Therefore, they may be reluctant to adapt to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Mohammadreza Nazari , Majid Jahani , Lawrence V. Snyder , Martin Takáč