English
Related papers

Related papers: Why Does Reinforcement Learning Generalize? A Feat…

200 papers

The growing disparity between the exponential scaling of computational resources and the finite growth of high-quality text data now constrains conventional scaling approaches for large language models (LLMs). To address this challenge, we…

The majority of language model training builds on imitation learning. It covers pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and affects the starting conditions for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The simplicity and scalability…

Large language models (LLMs) acquire substantial world knowledge during pre-training, which is further shaped by post-training techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, the impact of SFT on a model's knowledge remains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Junjie Ye , Yuming Yang , Yang Nan , Shuo Li , Qi Zhang , Tao Gui , Xuanjing Huang , Peng Wang , Zhongchao Shi , Jianping Fan

While reinforcement learning (RL) demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of language models, the training dynamics of RL in LLMs remain unclear. In this work, we provide an explanation of the RL training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xingwu Chen , Tianle Li , Difan Zou

We show that iterative deployment of large language models (LLMs), each fine-tuned on data carefully curated by users from the previous models' deployment, can significantly change the properties of the resultant models. By testing this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Augusto B. Corrêa , Yoav Gelberg , Luckeciano C. Melo , Ilia Shumailov , André G. Pereira , Yarin Gal

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently shown strong potential in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models and is now being actively extended to vision-language models (VLMs). However, existing RL applications in VLMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Yan Ma , Steffi Chern , Xuyang Shen , Yiran Zhong , Pengfei Liu

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have exhibited great potential in solving single-task sequential decision-making problems with high-dimensional observations and long horizons, but are known to be hard to generalize across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Boyuan Chen , Chuning Zhu , Pulkit Agrawal , Kaiqing Zhang , Abhishek Gupta

Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is widely believed to have the potential to improve sample efficiency by allowing an agent to synthesize large amounts of imagined experience. Experience Replay (ER) can be considered a simple kind of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Kenny Young , Aditya Ramesh , Louis Kirsch , Jürgen Schmidhuber

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emergent capabilities in complex reasoning, largely spurred by rule-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques applied during the post-training. This has raised the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Sneheel Sarangi , Hanan Salam

The power of foundation models (FMs) lies in their capacity to learn highly expressive representations that can be adapted to a broad spectrum of tasks. However, these pretrained models require additional training stages to become effective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Jacob L. Block , Sundararajan Srinivasan , Liam Collins , Aryan Mokhtari , Sanjay Shakkottai

Recent studies have successfully integrated large vision-language models (VLMs) into low-level robotic control by supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with expert robotic datasets, resulting in what we term vision-language-action (VLA) models.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Yanjiang Guo , Jianke Zhang , Xiaoyu Chen , Xiang Ji , Yen-Jen Wang , Yucheng Hu , Jianyu Chen

Protein language models (PLMs) have advanced computational protein science through large-scale pretraining and scalable architectures. In parallel, reinforcement learning (RL) has broadened exploration and enabled precise multi-objective…

While scaling laws for large language models (LLMs) during pre-training have been extensively studied, their behavior under reinforcement learning (RL) post-training remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a systematic empirical…

The success of AI assistants based on language models (LLMs) hinges crucially on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which enables the generation of responses more aligned with human preferences. As universal AI assistants,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Rui Zheng , Wei Shen , Yuan Hua , Wenbin Lai , Shihan Dou , Yuhao Zhou , Zhiheng Xi , Xiao Wang , Haoran Huang , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

The Superficial Alignment Hypothesis posits that almost all of a language model's abilities and knowledge are learned during pre-training, while post-training is about giving a model the right style and format. We re-examine these claims by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Mohit Raghavendra , Vaskar Nath , Sean Hendryx

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

Image-based reinforcement learning (RL) faces significant challenges in generalization when the visual environment undergoes substantial changes between training and deployment. Under such circumstances, learned policies may not perform…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Weiyao Wang , Xinyuan Fang , Gregory D. Hager

Reinforcement learning (RL) enhanced large language models (LLMs), particularly exemplified by DeepSeek-R1, have exhibited outstanding performance. Despite the effectiveness in improving LLM capabilities, its implementation remains highly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Shuhe Wang , Shengyu Zhang , Jie Zhang , Runyi Hu , Xiaoya Li , Tianwei Zhang , Jiwei Li , Fei Wu , Guoyin Wang , Eduard Hovy

Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) is proved to be greatly valuable for enhancing the reasoning ability of LLMs. Researchers have been starting to apply RFT to MLLMs, hoping it will also enhance the capabilities of visual understanding.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Xiaxu Chen , Wei Li , Chunxu Liu , Chi Xie , Xiaoyan Hu , Chengqian Ma , Feng Zhu , Rui Zhao

By pretraining on trillions of tokens, an LLM gains the capability of text generation. However, to enhance its utility and reduce potential harm, SFT and alignment are applied sequentially to the pretrained model. Because SFT and alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Zhichao Wang , Bin Bi , Zixu Zhu , Xiangbo Mao , Jun Wang , Shiyu Wang , Cheng Wang , Dong Nie , Lingzi Hong