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Recent advances in group-based reinforcement learning (RL) have driven frontier large language models (LLMs) in single-turn tasks like mathematical reasoning. However, their scalability to multi-turn LLM agent training remains limited.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Lang Feng , Zhenghai Xue , Tingcong Liu , Bo An

Reward-based alignment methods for large language models (LLMs) face two key limitations: vulnerability to reward hacking, where models exploit flaws in the reward signal; and reliance on brittle, labor-intensive prompt engineering when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Zae Myung Kim , Chanwoo Park , Vipul Raheja , Suin Kim , Dongyeop Kang

Improving and understanding the training dynamics and reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become essential for their deployment in AI-based security tools, such as software vulnerability detection. In this work, we present an…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Marco Simoni , Aleksandar Fontana , Giulio Rossolini , Andrea Saracino

Large Language Model(LLM)-based agents have shown strong capabilities in web information seeking, with reinforcement learning (RL) becoming a key optimization paradigm. However, planning remains a bottleneck, as existing methods struggle…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Xinmiao Yu , Liwen Zhang , Xiaocheng Feng , Yong Jiang , Bing Qin , Pengjun Xie , Jingren Zhou

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

Outcome-driven reinforcement learning has advanced reasoning in large language models (LLMs), but prevailing tool-augmented approaches train a single, monolithic policy that interleaves thoughts and tool calls under full context; this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Zhuofeng Li , Haoxiang Zhang , Seungju Han , Sheng Liu , Jianwen Xie , Yu Zhang , Yejin Choi , James Zou , Pan Lu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in knowledge acquisition, reasoning, and tool use, making them promising candidates for autonomous agent applications. However, training LLM agents for complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Hanjiang Hu , Changliu Liu , Na Li , Yebin Wang

In an era where tool-augmented AI agents are becoming increasingly vital, our findings highlight the ability of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to empower SLMs, which are traditionally constrained in tool use. The ability to use…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Dhruvi Paprunia , Vansh Kharidia , Pankti Doshi

Enhancing LLMs with the ability to actively search external knowledge is crucial for complex and real-world tasks. Current approaches either rely on prompting to elicit the model's innate agent capabilities, or suffer from performance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Chenyang Gu , Yewen Pu , Bruce Yang , Xiaofan Li , Huan Gao

We study whether self-learning can scale LLM-based agents without relying on human-curated datasets or predefined rule-based rewards. Through controlled experiments in a search-agent setting, we identify two key determinants of scalable…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Wangtao Sun , Xiang Cheng , Jialin Fan , Yao Xu , Xing Yu , Shizhu He , Jun Zhao , Kang Liu

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are powerful at integrating diverse data, but they often struggle with complex reasoning. While Reinforcement learning (RL) can boost reasoning in LLMs, applying it to MLLMs is tricky. Common issues…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Minjie Hong , Zirun Guo , Yan Xia , Zehan Wang , Ziang Zhang , Tao Jin , Zhou Zhao

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance on a wide range of complex reasoning tasks, yet further gains are often possible by leveraging the complementary strengths of multiple models. While multi-agent frameworks can…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Andrew Estornell , Jean-Francois Ton , Muhammad Faaiz Taufiq , Hang Li

The emergence of large language model (LLM)-based agents has significantly advanced the development of autonomous machine learning (ML) engineering. However, the dominant prompt-based paradigm exhibits limitations: smaller models lack the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Zexi Liu , Jingyi Chai , Xinyu Zhu , Shuo Tang , Rui Ye , Bo Zhang , Lei Bai , Siheng Chen

The recent success in using human preferences to align large language models (LLMs) has significantly improved their performance in various downstream tasks, such as question answering, mathematical reasoning, and code generation. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Xiaoqiang Lin , Arun Verma , Zhongxiang Dai , Daniela Rus , See-Kiong Ng , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited extraordinary performance in a variety of tasks while it remains challenging for them to solve complex multi-step tasks as agents. In practice, agents sensitive to the outcome of certain key steps…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Zilong Wang , Jingfeng Yang , Sreyashi Nag , Samarth Varshney , Xianfeng Tang , Haoming Jiang , Jingbo Shang , Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar

Reinforcement learning with verifiable reward has recently emerged as a central paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs); however, prevailing mean-based methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Tao Ren , Jinyang Jiang , Hui Yang , Wan Tian , Minhao Zou , Guanghao Li , Zishi Zhang , Qinghao Wang , Shentao Qin , Yanjun Zhao , Rui Tao , Hui Shao , Yijie Peng

Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) increasingly relies on sparse, outcome-level rewards -- yet determining which actions within a long trajectory caused the outcome remains difficult. This credit assignment (CA)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Chenchen Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being explored for building Agents capable of active environmental interaction (e.g., via tool use) to solve complex problems. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is considered a key technology with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Mingyue Cheng , Jie Ouyang , Shuo Yu , Ruiran Yan , Yucong Luo , Zirui Liu , Daoyu Wang , Qi Liu , Enhong Chen

Group-based reinforcement learning (RL), such as GRPO, has advanced the capabilities of large language models on long-horizon agentic tasks. To enable more fine-grained policy updates, recent research has increasingly shifted toward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Shuo He , Lang Feng , Qi Wei , Xin Cheng , Lei Feng , Bo An

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