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Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework to optimize a control policy using rewards that are revealed by the system as a response to a control action. In its standard form, RL involves a single agent that uses its policy to accomplish a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-11-24 Juan Cervino , Juan Andres Bazerque , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training paradigm for large language models (LLMs), but its performance is highly sensitive to the quality of training problems. This sensitivity stems from the non-stationarity of RL:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Ningyuan Yang , Weihua Du , Weiwei Sun , Sean Welleck , Yiming Yang

Enhancing the complex reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) attracts widespread attention. While reinforcement learning (RL) has shown superior performance for improving complex reasoning, its impact on cross-lingual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Shulin Huang , Yiran Ding , Junshu Pan , Yue Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) acquire extensive prior knowledge through large-scale pretraining and can be further enhanced via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training. A growing body of evidence has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Honglin Zhang , Qianyue Hao , Fengli Xu , Yong Li

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) is critical for developing effective and safe language models. Traditional approaches focus on aligning models during the instruction tuning or reinforcement learning stages, referred to in this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Juhao Liang , Zhenyang Cai , Jianqing Zhu , Huang Huang , Kewei Zong , Bang An , Mosen Alharthi , Juncai He , Lian Zhang , Haizhou Li , Benyou Wang , Jinchao Xu

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in reasoning tasks, yet the optimal integration of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a fundamental challenge. Through comprehensive analysis…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Yuqian Fu , Tinghong Chen , Jiajun Chai , Xihuai Wang , Songjun Tu , Guojun Yin , Wei Lin , Qichao Zhang , Yuanheng Zhu , Dongbin Zhao

The functionality of Large Language Model (LLM) agents is primarily determined by two capabilities: action planning and answer summarization. The former, action planning, is the core capability that dictates an agent's performance. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Zhiwei Li , Yong Hu , Wenqing Wang

Recent advancements in reasoning-focused language models such as OpenAI's O1 and DeepSeek-R1 have shown that scaling test-time computation-through chain-of-thought reasoning and iterative exploration-can yield substantial improvements on…

Post-training of large language models routinely interleaves supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning (RL). These two methods have different objectives: SFT minimizes the cross-entropy loss between model outputs and expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xueyan Niu , Bo Bai , Wei Han , Weixi Zhang

Reinforcement learning post-training has substantially improved the reasoning accuracy of vision-language models, yet the resulting policies remain poorly calibrated. Terminal correctness rewards provide no gradient that penalizes confident…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Peng Cui , Boyao Yang , Jun Zhu

Prevalent reinforcement learning~(RL) methods for fine-tuning LLM reasoners, such as GRPO or Leave-one-out PPO, abandon the learned value function in favor of empirically estimated returns. This hinders test-time compute scaling that relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Kusha Sareen , Morgane M Moss , Alessandro Sordoni , Rishabh Agarwal , Arian Hosseini

Training tool-augmented LLMs has emerged as a promising approach to enhancing language models' capabilities for complex tasks. The current supervised fine-tuning paradigm relies on constructing extensive domain-specific datasets to train…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Yirong Zeng , Xiao Ding , Yutai Hou , Yuxian Wang , Li Du , Juyi Dai , Qiuyang Ding , Duyu Tang , Dandan Tu , Weiwen Liu , Bing Qin , Ting Liu

Humans are good at learning on the job: We learn how to solve the tasks we face as we go along. Can a model do the same? We propose an agent that assembles a task-specific curriculum, called test-time curriculum (TTC-RL), and applies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jonas Hübotter , Leander Diaz-Bone , Ido Hakimi , Andreas Krause , Moritz Hardt

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences usually requires fine-tuning methods such as RLHF and DPO. These methods directly optimize the model parameters, so they cannot be used in test-time to improve model performance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Xinnan Zhang , Chenliang Li , Siliang Zeng , Jiaxiang Li , Zhongruo Wang , Kaixiang Lin , Songtao Lu , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to reason during post-training typically relies on reinforcement learning with explicit outcome- or process-based reward functions. However, in many real-world settings, obtaining or defining such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Claudio Fanconi , Nicolás Astorga , Mihaela van der Schaar

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a method for learning decision-making tasks that could enable robots to learn and adapt to their situation on-line. For an RL algorithm to be practical for robotic control tasks, it must learn in very few…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Todd Hester , Michael Quinlan , Peter Stone

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a naturalistic framing for learning through trial and error, which is appealing both because of its simplicity and effectiveness and because of its resemblance to how humans and animals acquire skills…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Archit Sharma , Kelvin Xu , Nikhil Sardana , Abhishek Gupta , Karol Hausman , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

After the pretraining stage of LLMs, techniques such as SFT, RLHF, RLVR, and RFT are applied to enhance instruction-following ability, mitigate undesired responses, improve reasoning capability and enable efficient domain adaptation with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Zhichao Wang , Andy Wong , Ruslan Belkin

The success of RL for LLM post-training stems from an unreasonably uninformative source: a single bit of information per rollout as binary reward or preference label. At the other extreme, distillation offers dense supervision but requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Yuda Song , Lili Chen , Fahim Tajwar , Remi Munos , Deepak Pathak , J. Andrew Bagnell , Aarti Singh , Andrea Zanette

Reinforcement learning (RL) depends critically on the choice of reward functions used to capture the de- sired behavior and constraints of a robot. Usually, these are handcrafted by a expert designer and represent heuristics for relatively…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-03-03 Xiao Li , Cristian-Ioan Vasile , Calin Belta