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Reinforcement learning for large language models faces a fundamental trade-off between sample efficiency and asymptotic performance: strictly on-policy methods discard trajectories after a single update, while off-policy reuse introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Changyu Chen , Xiting Wang , Rui Yan

Test-time scaling has been shown to substantially improve large language models' (LLMs) mathematical reasoning. However, for a large portion of mathematical corpora, especially theorem proving, RLVR's scalability is limited: intermediate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Zhen Wang , Zhifeng Gao , Guolin Ke

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a crucial paradigm for unlocking the advanced reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), encompassing frameworks like RLHF and RLAIF. Regardless of the specific optimization algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Rui Zhu , Weiheng Bai , Qiushi Wu , Yang Ren , Haixu Tang , Yuchu Liu

Continual supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the de facto recipe for adapting large language models (LLMs) to a stream of downstream tasks, but it suffers from catastrophic forgetting of earlier capabilities. Recent work shows that on-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yan Chen , Taojie Zhu , Meng Zhang , Xin Chen , Jiaqi Huang , Dongyang Xu , Yizhi Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven to be an effective post-training strategy for enhancing reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs). Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a recent prominent method that encourages models to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Jiaqi Wang , Kevin Qinghong Lin , James Cheng , Mike Zheng Shou

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the complex reasoning capabilities of Large Reasoning Models. However, standard outcome-based supervision suffers from a critical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yanwei Ren , Haotian Zhang , Likang Xiao , Xikai Zhang , Jiaxing Huang , Jiayan Qiu , Baosheng Yu , Quan Chen , Liu Liu

Reinforcement learning algorithms are fundamental to align large language models with human preferences and to enhance their reasoning capabilities. However, current reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from training instability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Yaru Hao , Li Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Zewen Chi , Furu Wei

On-policy distillation (OPD) is an increasingly important paradigm for post-training language models. However, we identify a pervasive Scaling Law of Miscalibration: while OPD effectively improves task accuracy, it systematically traps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Jiaxin Zhang , Xiangyu Peng , Qinglin Chen , Qinyuan Ye , Caiming Xiong , Chien-Sheng Wu

On-policy self-distillation (SD) improves LLM reasoning by using teacher-side privileged information (PI) to turn sparse verifier outcomes into dense token-level supervision. Existing methods usually assume trusted PI, such as reference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jiazhen Huang , Xiao Chen , Xiao Luo , Yong Dai , Senkang Hu , Yuzhi Zhao

Distilling reasoning traces from strong large language models into smaller ones is a promising route to improve intelligence in resource-constrained settings. Existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off: offline distillation from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Yumeng Zhang , Zhengbang Yang , Yevin Nikhel Goonatilake , Zhuangdi Zhu

Through encouraging self-exploration, reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models. As the starting point for RLVR, the capacity of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Yongyu Mu , Jiali Zeng , Fandong Meng , JingBo Zhu , Tong Xiao

Many existing studies have achieved significant improvements in the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) through reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), while the enhancement of reasoning abilities in small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Zhong Guan , Likang Wu , Hongke Zhao , Jiahui Wang , Le Wu

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), especially when combined with reinforcement learning (RL) based post-training methods. While longer reasoning traces can improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Qinhang Wu , Sen Lin , Ming Zhang , Yingbin Liang , Ness B. Shroff

The remarkable capabilities of modern large reasoning models are largely unlocked through post-training techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). However, the architectural mechanisms behind such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yein Park , Minbyul Jeong , Jaewoo Kang

On-policy self-distillation (self-OPD) densifies reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) by letting a policy teach itself under privileged context. We find that when this guidance spans the full response, all-token KL spends…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jiaxuan Wang , Xuan Ouyang , Zhiyu Chen , Yulan Hu , Zheng Pan , Xin Li , Lan-Zhe Guo

Large language model post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reinforcement learning (RL), and distillation are often analyzed through their loss functions: maximum likelihood, policy gradients, forward KL, reverse KL, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Dong Nie

On-policy distillation (OPD) is a powerful paradigm for model alignment, yet its reliance on teacher logits restricts its application to white-box scenarios. We contend that structured semantic rubrics can serve as a scalable alternative to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Junfeng Fang , Zhepei Hong , Mao Zheng , Mingyang Song , Gengsheng Li , Houcheng Jiang , Dan Zhang , Haiyun Guo , Xiang Wang , Tat-Seng Chua

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become an effective paradigm for improving the reasoning ability of large language models. However, widely used RLVR algorithms, such as GRPO, often suffer from entropy collapse,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Huimin Xu , Shuai Zhao , Xiaobao Wu , Anh Tuan Luu

The central challenge of reinforcement learning for reasoning lies not only in the sparsity of outcome-level supervision, but more fundamentally in how to transform feedback provided only at the end of a sequence into fine-grained learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Fei Ding , Yongkang Zhang , Runhao Liu , Yuhao Liao , Zijian Zeng , Sibo wang , Huiming Yang

We consider the problem of offline reinforcement learning (RL) -- a well-motivated setting of RL that aims at policy optimization using only historical data. Despite its wide applicability, theoretical understandings of offline RL, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-04 Ming Yin , Yu Bai , Yu-Xiang Wang