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Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate transformative potential, yet their reasoning remains inconsistent and unreliable. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning is a key mechanism for improvement, but its effectiveness is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Pei-Chi Pan , Yingbin Liang , Sen Lin

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

In reinforcement learning (RL), the consideration of multivariate reward signals has led to fundamental advancements in multi-objective decision-making, transfer learning, and representation learning. This work introduces the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Harley Wiltzer , Jesse Farebrother , Arthur Gretton , Mark Rowland

Despite the fact that deep reinforcement learning (RL) has surpassed human-level performances in various tasks, it still has several fundamental challenges. First, most RL methods require intensive data from the exploration of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Zhe Xu , Bo Wu , Aditya Ojha , Daniel Neider , Ufuk Topcu

Reinforcement learning (RL) combines a control problem with statistical estimation: The system dynamics are not known to the agent, but can be learned through experience. A recent line of research casts `RL as inference' and suggests a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-05 Brendan O'Donoghue , Ian Osband , Catalin Ionescu

Reinforcement learning is emerging as a primary driver for improving language model reasoning capabilities. A fundamental question is whether current reinforcement learning algorithms -- such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Andre He , Daniel Fried , Sean Welleck

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has fueled multiple high-profile successes in machine learning, it is held back from more widespread adoption by its often poor data efficiency and the limited generality of the policies it produces. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Jacob Beck , Risto Vuorio , Evan Zheran Liu , Zheng Xiong , Luisa Zintgraf , Chelsea Finn , Shimon Whiteson

Recent advancements have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) can substantially improve the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). The effectiveness of such RL training, however, depends critically on the exploration space…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Haoyuan Wu , Hai Wang , Jiajia Wu , Jinxiang Ou , Keyao Wang , Weile Chen , Zihao Zheng , Bei Yu

Reasoning in large language models has long been a central research focus, and recent studies employing reinforcement learning (RL) have introduced diverse methods that yield substantial performance gains with minimal or even no external…

Reasoning abilities, especially those for solving complex math problems, are crucial components of general intelligence. Recent advances by proprietary companies, such as o-series models of OpenAI, have made remarkable progress on reasoning…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in LLM reasoning, but whether it can also improve direct recall of parametric knowledge remains an open question. We study this question in a controlled zero-shot, one-hop,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Wanli Yang , Hongyu Zang , Junwei Zhang , Wenjie Shi , Du Su , Jingang Wang , Xueqi Cheng , Fei Sun

The effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in continuous control robotics tasks is mainly dependent on the design of the underlying reward function, which is highly prone to reward hacking. A misalignment between the reward…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has significantly improved reasoning in large language models (LLMs), yet the token-level mechanisms underlying these improvements remain unclear. We present a systematic empirical study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Haoming Meng , Kexin Huang , Shaohang Wei , Chiyu Ma , Shuo Yang , Xue Wang , Guoyin Wang , Bolin Ding , Jingren Zhou

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

Recent advances in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to large language models (LLMs) have led to substantial progress. In particular, a series of remarkable yet often counterintuitive phenomena have been reported in LLMs, exhibiting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Haoze Wu , Cheng Wang , Wenshuo Zhao , Junxian He

Existing agents for solving tasks such as ML engineering rely on prompting powerful language models. As a result, these agents do not improve with more experience. In this paper, we show that agents backed by weaker models that improve via…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Sherry Yang , Joy He-Yueya , Percy Liang

Fine-tuning foundation models has emerged as a powerful approach for generating objects with specific desired properties. Reinforcement learning (RL) provides an effective framework for this purpose, enabling models to generate outputs that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Pouya M. Ghari , Simone Sciabola , Ye Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome-based rewards has proven effective for improving large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, its success often depends on the base model occasionally sampling correct solutions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jatin Prakash , Anirudh Buvanesh

Frontier reasoning models have exhibited incredible capabilities across a wide array of disciplines, driven by posttraining large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL). However, despite the widespread success of this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Aayush Karan , Yilun Du