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Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise in knowledge-intensive tasks but face limitations in complex multi-step reasoning. While recent methods have integrated RAG with chain-of-thought…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Zhongxiang Sun , Qipeng Wang , Weijie Yu , Xiaoxue Zang , Kai Zheng , Jun Xu , Xiao Zhang , Song Yang , Han Li

The increasing integration of Large Language Model (LLM) based search engines has transformed the landscape of information retrieval. However, these systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, especially ranking manipulation attacks,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Xiyang Hu

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Yuxuan Jiang , Francis Ferraro

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

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

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have recently achieved significant progress in complex reasoning tasks, aided by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. However, LRMs often suffer from overthinking, expending excessive computation on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Chuhuai Yue , Chengqi Dong , Yinan Gao , Hang He , Jiajun Chai , Guojun Yin , Wei Lin

The shift toward interacting with frozen, "black-box" Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed prompt engineering from a heuristic exercise into a critical optimization challenge. We propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Krishna Sayana , Ketan Todi , Ambarish Jash

Reliable reward models (RMs) are critical for ensuring the safe alignment of large language models (LLMs). However, current RM evaluation methods focus solely on preference perception accuracies in given specific scenarios, obscuring the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Jianxiang Zang , Yongda Wei , Ruxue Bai , Shiyu Jiang , Nijia Mo , Binhong Li , Qiang Sun , Hui Liu

Large language models (LLMs) solve complex problems by generating multi-step reasoning traces. Yet these traces are typically analyzed from only one of two perspectives: the sequence of tokens across different reasoning steps in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Ruidi Chang , Jiawei Zhou , Hanjie Chen

Reward hacking, where a reasoning model exploits loopholes in a reward function to achieve high rewards without solving the intended task, poses a significant threat. This behavior may be explicit, i.e. verbalized in the model's…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Xinpeng Wang , Nitish Joshi , Barbara Plank , Rico Angell , He He

Most discussions about Large Language Model (LLM) safety have focused on single-agent settings but multi-agent LLM systems now create novel adversarial risks because their behavior depends on communication between agents and decentralized…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Rana Muhammad Shahroz Khan , Zhen Tan , Sukwon Yun , Charles Fleming , Tianlong Chen

We present Athena-PRM, a multimodal process reward model (PRM) designed to evaluate the reward score for each step in solving complex reasoning problems. Developing high-performance PRMs typically demands significant time and financial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Shuai Wang , Zhenhua Liu , Jiaheng Wei , Xuanwu Yin , Dong Li , Emad Barsoum

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been widely used to underpin various downstream tasks. However, the adversarial attack task has found that PLMs are vulnerable to small perturbations. Mainstream methods adopt a detached two-stage…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Xuanjie Fang , Sijie Cheng , Yang Liu , Wei Wang

For sparse, structured reinforcement-learning tasks with semantic reward-function interfaces, LLM-generated reward shaping is better framed as debugging than one-shot generation. We study PPO-trained agents using MiniGrid as core evaluation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Youting Wang , Yuan Tang , Bowen Liu , Xuan Liu , Dingyan Shang

Reward-guided search methods have demonstrated strong potential in enhancing tool-using agents by effectively guiding sampling and exploration over complex action spaces. As a core design, those search methods utilize process reward models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Dawei Li , Yuguang Yao , Zhen Tan , Huan Liu , Ruocheng Guo

This paper investigates prior prompt engineering (pPE) in the context of reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT), where language models (LMs) are incentivized to exhibit behaviors that maximize performance through reward signals. While existing RFT…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Pittawat Taveekitworachai , Potsawee Manakul , Sarana Nutanong , Kunat Pipatanakul

Reward models have become a staple in modern NLP, serving as not only a scalable text evaluator, but also an indispensable component in many alignment recipes and inference-time algorithms. However, while recent reward models increase…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Zhaofeng Wu , Michihiro Yasunaga , Andrew Cohen , Yoon Kim , Asli Celikyilmaz , Marjan Ghazvininejad

Despite the success of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) in aligning language models with human values, reward hacking, also termed reward overoptimization, remains a critical challenge. This issue primarily arises from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Yuchun Miao , Sen Zhang , Liang Ding , Rong Bao , Lefei Zhang , Dacheng Tao

Test-time scaling (TTS) for large language models (LLMs) has thus far fallen into two largely separate paradigms: (1) reinforcement learning (RL) methods that optimize sparse outcome-based rewards, yet suffer from instability and low sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Can Jin , Yang Zhou , Qixin Zhang , Hongwu Peng , Di Zhang , Zihan Dong , Marco Pavone , Ligong Han , Zhang-Wei Hong , Tong Che , Dimitris N. Metaxas

Reward models are central to large language model (LLM) post-training. However, past work has shown that they can reward spurious or undesirable attributes such as length, format, hallucinations, and sycophancy. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Atticus Wang , Iván Arcuschin , Arthur Conmy