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Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for inducing explicit reasoning behaviors in large language and vision-language models. However, reasoning-oriented RL post-training remains fundamentally challenging due to…

Recent research enhances language model reasoning by scaling test-time compute via longer chain-of-thought traces. This often improves accuracy but also introduces redundancy and high computational cost, especially for small language models…

On-policy self-distillation, where a student is pulled toward a copy of itself conditioned on privileged context (e.g., a verified solution or feedback), offers a promising direction for advancing reasoning capability without a stronger…

On-policy distillation is pivotal for transferring reasoning capabilities to capacity-constrained models, yet remains prone to instability and negative transfer. We show that on-policy distillation can be interpreted, both theoretically and…

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to long-context tasks requires post-training methods that remain accurate and coherent over thousands of tokens. Existing approaches are limited in several ways: 1) off-policy methods such as supervised…

Training language models to produce both correct answers and sound reasoning remains an open challenge. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards typically optimizes only final outcomes, which can lead to a failure mode where task…

Test-time scaling has proven effective in further enhancing the performance of pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs). However, mainstream post-training methods (i.e., reinforcement learning (RL) with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning)…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves final-answer accuracy on reasoning tasks, but it does not reliably improve reasoning quality. Because outcome rewards only assess final answers, they also reward spurious…

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a principled post-training paradigm for Temporal Video Grounding (TVG) due to its on-policy optimization, yet existing GRPO-based methods remain fundamentally constrained by sparse reward signals and…

On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as an efficient post-training paradigm for large language models. However, existing studies largely attribute this advantage to denser and more stable supervision, while the parameter-level…

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with problems that require multi-step reasoning. For small-scale open-source models, Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) fails when correct solutions are rarely sampled even…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as the leading approach for enhancing reasoning capabilities in large language models. However, it faces a fundamental compute and memory asymmetry: rollout generation is…

Reasoning-oriented language models achieve strong performance by generating long chain-of-thought traces at inference time. However, this capability comes with substantial and often excessive computational cost, which can materialize in…

Training-time privileged information (PI) can enable language models to succeed on tasks they would otherwise fail, making it a powerful tool for reinforcement learning in hard, long-horizon settings. However, transferring capabilities…

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving diffusion-based text-to-image models, but existing methods are largely limited to single-task optimization. Extending RL to multiple tasks is challenging: joint…

Large language models are increasingly post-trained with reinforcement learning in verifiable domains such as code and math. Yet, current methods for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) learn only from a scalar outcome…

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) suffers from sparse outcome signals, creating severe exploration bottlenecks on complex reasoning tasks. Recent on-policy self-distillation methods attempt to address this by utilizing…

Training VideoLLMs for complex reasoning remains challenging due to sparse sequence level rewards and the lack of fine grained credit assignment over long, temporally grounded reasoning trajectories. While reinforcement learning with…

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a standard post-training recipe for improving Large Language Models (LLM) reasoning, but why it works remains unclear. We revisit the common claim that ``SFT memorizes,…

Knowledge distillation is central to LLM post-training, yet its design space remains poorly understood, especially alongside reinforcement learning (RL). We show that the prevailing paradigms, off-policy distillation and on-policy…