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We introduce Discrete flow Matching policy Optimization (DoMinO), a unified framework for Reinforcement Learning (RL) fine-tuning Discrete Flow Matching (DFM) models under a broad class of policy gradient methods. Our key idea is to view…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Maojiang Su , Po-Chung Hsieh , Weimin Wu , Mingcheng Lu , Jiunhau Chen , Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu , Han Liu

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) shows promise in training tool-use Large Language Models (LLMs) using verifiable outcome rewards, existing methods largely overlook the potential of reasoning rewards based on chain-of-thought quality for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Zihan Lin , Xiaohan Wang , Hexiong Yang , Jiajun Chai , Jie Cao , Guojun Yin , Wei Lin , Ran He

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is widely used after supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to align language models, yet empirical behavior under small backbones and modest data is under-specified. We systematically compare SFT-only, DPO-only,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Yuming Feng , Christy Yang

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and safety constraints is challenging, especially when objectives like helpfulness, truthfulness, and avoidance of harm conflict. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Xuying Li , Zhuo Li , Yuji Kosuga , Victor Bian

Reinforcement Learning, particularly through policy gradient methods, has played a central role in enabling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, the optimization stability of policy gradients in this setting remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Luckeciano C. Melo , Alessandro Abate , Yarin Gal

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically fine-tuned for reasoning tasks through a two-stage pipeline of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL), a process fraught with catastrophic forgetting and suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Lixuan He , Jie Feng , Yong Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely used for post-training large language models (LLMs) in code editing, where group-relative methods, such as GRPO, are popular due to their critic-free and normalized advantage estimation. However, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Jianqing Zhang , Zhezheng Hao , Wei Xia , Hande Dong , Hong Wang , Chenxing Wei , Yuyan Zhou , Yubin Qi , Qiang Lin , Jian Cao

We study reinforcement learning in hybrid discrete-continuous action spaces, such as settings where the discrete component selects a regime (or index) and the continuous component optimizes within it -- a structure common in robotics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Matias Alvo , Daniel Russo , Yash Kanoria

We propose DiFFPO, Diffusion Fast and Furious Policy Optimization, a unified framework for training masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs) to reason not only better (furious), but also faster via reinforcement learning (RL). We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Hanyang Zhao , Dawen Liang , Wenpin Tang , David Yao , Nathan Kallus

Offline reinforcement learning agents face significant deployment challenges due to the synthetic-to-real distribution mismatch. While most prior research has focused on improving the fidelity of synthetic sampling and incorporating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Chi Zhou , Wang Luo , Haoran Li , Congying Han , Tiande Guo , Zicheng Zhang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is pivotal for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, yet mainstream algorithms such as GRPO and DAPO remain constrained by a coarse-grained credit assignment paradigm, where all tokens within the same…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Hongze Tan , Zihan Wang , Jianfei Pan , Jinghao Lin , Hao Wang , Yifan Wu , Tao Chen , Zhihang Zheng , Zhihao Tang , Haihua Yang

Optimizing communication topology is fundamental to the efficiency and effectiveness of Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). While recent approaches utilize reinforcement learning to dynamically construct…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Yueyang Cang , Xiaoteng Zhang , Erlu Zhao , Zehua Ji , Yuhang Liu , Yuchen He , Zhiyuan Ning , Chen Yijun , Wenge Que , Li Shi

Large language models are typically post-trained using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), yet effectively unifying efficient knowledge injection with robust generalization remains challenging. In this work, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Wangjie Gan , Miao Pan , Linbo Xi , Wenqi Zhang , Jintao Chen , Jianwei Yin , Xuhong Zhang

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has become a crucial step for aligning pretrained large language models (LLMs) using supervised datasets of input-output pairs. However, despite being supervised, SFT is inherently limited by its generative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Siqi Guo , Ilgee Hong , Vicente Balmaseda , Changlong Yu , Liang Qiu , Xin Liu , Haoming Jiang , Tuo Zhao , Tianbao Yang

Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to respond correctly to prompts that align well with the data they were trained and fine-tuned on. Yet, small shifts in wording, format, or language can trigger surprisingly large failures, especially on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yeping Jin , Jiaming Hu , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) for multi-turn Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) - where models iteratively reason, generate code, and verify through execution - remains challenging for existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yifeng Ding , Hung Le , Songyang Han , Kangrui Ruan , Zhenghui Jin , Varun Kumar , Zijian Wang , Anoop Deoras

Reinforcement learning (RL) policies often fail under dynamics that differ from training, a gap not fully addressed by domain randomization or existing adversarial RL methods. Distributionally robust RL provides a formal remedy but still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Mintae Kim , Koushil Sreenath

Existing Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), have achieved remarkable progress in improving the reasoning capabilities of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Hsiu-Yuan Huang , Chenming Tang , Weijie Liu , Clive Bai , Saiyong Yang , Yunfang Wu

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve explicit chain-of-thought expansion by imitating deep thinking behaviors of humans, demonstrating excellent performance in complex task scenarios. However, the deep-thinking mode often leads to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Qian Wan , Ziao Xu , Luona Wei , Xiaoxuan Shen , Jianwen Sun

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities through large-scale pretraining and post-training reinforcement learning, demonstrated by DeepSeek-R1. However, current post-training methods, such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Boyang Gu , Hongjian Zhou , Bradley Max Segal , Jinge Wu , Zeyu Cao , Hantao Zhong , Lei Clifton , Fenglin Liu , David A. Clifton