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Recent RL methods have substantially improved the reasoning abilities of LLMs. Existing reward designs mainly follow two paradigms: (1) Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) derives outcome signals from executable checks or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Sirui Chen , Lei Xu , Yuying Zhao , Yutian Chen , Yu Wang , Beier Zhu , Hanwang Zhang , Shengjie Zhao , Chaochao Lu

Reasoning is an essential capacity for large language models (LLMs) to address complex tasks, where the identification of process errors is vital for improving this ability. Recently, process-level reward models (PRMs) were proposed to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Zhaopan Xu , Pengfei Zhou , Jiaxin Ai , Wangbo Zhao , Kai Wang , Xiaojiang Peng , Wenqi Shao , Hongxun Yao , Kaipeng Zhang

Reward models (RMs) play a crucial role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences and enhancing reasoning quality. Traditionally, RMs are trained to rank candidate outputs based on their correctness and coherence.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Yuhui Xu , Hanze Dong , Lei Wang , Caiming Xiong , Junnan Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a promising paradigm for optimizing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in complex reasoning tasks. However, traditional outcome-based RL approaches often suffer from reward sparsity and inefficient…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Zhao Wang , Ziliang Zhao , Zhicheng Dou

External reasoning systems combine language models with process reward models (PRMs) to select high-quality reasoning paths for complex tasks such as mathematical problem solving. However, these systems are prone to reward hacking, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Ruike Song , Zeen Song , Huijie Guo , Wenwen Qiang

We study reward poisoning attacks in reinforcement learning (RL), where an adversary manipulates rewards within constrained budgets to force the target RL agent to adopt a policy that aligns with the attacker's objectives. Prior works on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Jose Efraim Aguilar Escamilla , Haoyang Hong , Jiawei Li , Haoyu Zhao , Xuezhou Zhang , Sanghyun Hong , Huazheng Wang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and related alignment paradigms have become central to steering large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) toward human-preferred behaviors. However, these…

Current LLM safety research predominantly focuses on mitigating Goal Hijacking, preventing attackers from redirecting a model's high-level objective (e.g., from "summarizing emails" to "phishing users"). In this paper, we argue that this…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Yuansen Liu , Yixuan Tang , Anthony Kum Hoe Tun

The reward model has become increasingly important in alignment, assessment, and data construction for large language models (LLMs). Most existing researchers focus on enhancing reward models through data improvements, following the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Shujun Liu , Xiaoyu Shen , Yuhang Lai , Siyuan Wang , Shengbin Yue , Zengfeng Huang , Xuanjing Huang , Zhongyu Wei

Recent generations of language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes before providing answers. While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Parshin Shojaee , Iman Mirzadeh , Keivan Alizadeh , Maxwell Horton , Samy Bengio , Mehrdad Farajtabar

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have emerged as a promising solution to mitigate LLM hallucinations and enhance their performance in knowledge-intensive domains. However, these systems are vulnerable to adversarial poisoning…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Jinyan Su , Jin Peng Zhou , Zhengxin Zhang , Preslav Nakov , Claire Cardie

While large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced mathematical reasoning, Process Reward Models (PRMs) have been developed to evaluate the logical validity of reasoning steps. However, PRMs still struggle with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Jiachen Zhu , Congmin Zheng , Jianghao Lin , Kounianhua Du , Ying Wen , Yong Yu , Jun Wang , Weinan Zhang

Process Reward Models (PRMs) provide step-level feedback for reasoning, but current PRMs usually output only a single reward score for each step. Downstream methods must therefore treat imperfect step-level reward predictions as reliable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Jinyuan Li , Langlin Huang , Chengsong Huang , Shaoyang Xu , Donghong Cai , Yuyi Yang , Wenxuan Zhang , Jiaxin Huang

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities but often struggle with complex, multi-step mathematical reasoning, where minor errors in visual perception or logical deduction can lead to complete failure.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Jianghangfan Zhang , Yibo Yan , Kening Zheng , Xin Zou , Song Dai , Xuming Hu

Reward model (RM) plays a pivotal role in reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) for aligning large language models (LLMs). However, classical RMs trained on human preferences are vulnerable to reward hacking and generalize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Zhenghao Xu , Qin Lu , Qingru Zhang , Liang Qiu , Ilgee Hong , Changlong Yu , Wenlin Yao , Yao Liu , Haoming Jiang , Lihong Li , Hyokun Yun , Tuo Zhao

Reward hacking--where agents exploit flaws in imperfect reward functions rather than performing tasks as intended--poses risks for AI alignment. Reward hacking has been observed in real training runs, with coding agents learning to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Mia Taylor , James Chua , Jan Betley , Johannes Treutlein , Owain Evans

Inference-time scaling methods rely on Process Reward Models (PRMs), which are often poorly calibrated and overestimate success probabilities. We propose, to our knowledge, the first use of conditional optimal transport for calibrating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Rachel Ma , Dylan Hadfield-Menell , Kristjan Greenewald

Large language models (LLMs) with explicit reasoning capabilities excel at mathematical reasoning yet still commit process errors, such as incorrect calculations, brittle logic, and superficially plausible but invalid steps. In this paper,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Qihao Liu , Luoxin Ye , Wufei Ma , Yu-Cheng Chou , Alan Yuille

Test-time compute scaling allocates inference computation uniformly, uses fixed sampling strategies, and applies verification only for reranking. In contrast, we propose a verifier-guided adaptive framework treating reasoning as iterative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Ahsan Bilal , Ahmed Mohsin , Muhammad Umer , Ali Subhan , Hassan Rizwan , Ayesha Mohsin , Dean Hougen

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) elicits long chain-of-thought reasoning in large language models (LLMs), but outcome-based rewards lead to coarse-grained advantage estimation. While existing approaches improve RLVR via…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Fei Wu , Zhenrong Zhang , Qikai Chang , Jianshu Zhang , Quan Liu , Jun Du