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Entropy regularization is a standard technique in reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance exploration, yet it yields negligible effects or even degrades performance in Large Language Models (LLMs). We attribute this failure to the cumulative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Chao Huang , Yujing Lu , Quangang Li , Shenghe Wang , Yan Wang , Yueyang Zhang , Long Xia , Jiashu Zhao , Zhiyuan Sun , Daiting Shi , Tingwen Liu

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has shown great promise in enhancing the reasoning abilities of large reasoning models (LRMs). However, it suffers from a critical issue: entropy collapse and premature convergence.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yuxian Jiang , Yafu Li , Guanxu Chen , Dongrui Liu , Yu Cheng , Jing Shao

Reinforcement learning has become the standard for improving reasoning in large language models, yet evidence increasingly suggests that RL does not teach new strategies; it redistributes probability mass over solutions the base model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Ömer Faruk Akgül , Rajgopal Kannan , Willie Neiswanger , Viktor Prasanna

Training models to effectively use test-time compute is crucial for improving the reasoning performance of LLMs. Current methods mostly do so via fine-tuning on search traces or running RL with 0/1 outcome reward, but do these approaches…

Multi-step processes via large language models (LLMs) have proven effective for solving complex reasoning tasks. However, the depth of exploration of the reasoning procedure can significantly affect the task performance. Existing methods to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Jinghan Zhang , Xiting Wang , Fengran Mo , Yeyang Zhou , Wanfu Gao , Kunpeng Liu

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a central approach for improving the reasoning ability of large language models. Recent work studies RLVR through token entropy, arguing that high-entropy tokens drive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Xinzhu Chen , Xuesheng Li , Zhongxiang Sun , Weijie Yu

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) offers an intuitive way to increase the sample efficiency of model-free RL methods by simultaneously training a world model that learns to predict the future. These models constitute the large…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Ashish Sundar , Chunbo Luo , Xiaoyang Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the dominant paradigm for improving the performance of language models on complex reasoning tasks. Despite the substantial empirical gains demonstrated by RL-based training methods like GRPO, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Jiayu Wang , Yifei Ming , Zixuan Ke , Caiming Xiong , Shafiq Joty , Aws Albarghouthi , Frederic Sala

This paper presents a general framework for exploiting the representational capacity of neural networks to approximate complex, nonlinear reward functions in the context of solving the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem. We show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-14 Markus Wulfmeier , Peter Ondruska , Ingmar Posner

Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially improved the ability of large language model (LLM) agents to interact with environments and solve multi-turn tasks. However, effective agentic RL remains challenging: sparse outcome-only rewards…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has become the default strategy for enhancing LLM capabilities, yet its application raises a fundamental question: when is explicit reasoning actually beneficial? Empirical evidence reveals a striking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Wei Xia , Haoqing Wang , Zhi-Hong Deng , Yehui Tang

Decoding strategies play a central role in shaping the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). Traditional methods such as greedy decoding and beam search often suffer from error propagation, while sampling-based approaches…

Various methods for solving the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem have been developed independently in machine learning and economics. In particular, the method of Maximum Causal Entropy IRL is based on the perspective of entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Navyata Sanghvi , Shinnosuke Usami , Mohit Sharma , Joachim Groeger , Kris Kitani

In the past decades, we have witnessed significant progress in the domain of autonomous driving. Advanced techniques based on optimization and reinforcement learning (RL) become increasingly powerful at solving the forward problem: given…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Zheng Wu , Liting Sun , Wei Zhan , Chenyu Yang , Masayoshi Tomizuka

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) require guarantees that the agent will perform well in the face of disturbances to the dynamics or reward function. In this paper, we prove theoretically that maximum entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-06 Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become central to training large language models (LLMs), yet the field lacks predictive scaling methodologies comparable to those established for pre-training. Despite rapidly rising compute budgets, there is…

Human guidance in reinforcement learning (RL) is often impractical for large-scale applications due to high costs and time constraints. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative to mitigate RL sample inefficiency and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Maryam Shoaeinaeini , Brent Harrison

Test-time scaling methods have seen a rapid increase in popularity for its computational efficiency and parameter-independent training to improve reasoning performance on Large Language Models. One such method is called budget forcing, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Ravindra Aribowo Tarunokusumo , Rafael Fernandes Cunha

Entropy minimization (EM) trains the model to concentrate even more probability mass on its most confident outputs. We show that this simple objective alone, without any labeled data, can substantially improve large language models' (LLMs)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Shivam Agarwal , Zimin Zhang , Lifan Yuan , Jiawei Han , Hao Peng

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover the reward function and the associated optimal policy that best fits observed sequences of states and actions implemented by an expert. Many algorithms for IRL have an inherently nested…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Siliang Zeng , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong