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Reasoning abilities, especially those for solving complex math problems, are crucial components of general intelligence. Recent advances by proprietary companies, such as o-series models of OpenAI, have made remarkable progress on reasoning…

Reasoning distillation aims to transfer multi-step reasoning capabilities from large language models to smaller, more efficient ones. While recent methods have shown promising gains, they typically rely on static teacher-student hierarchies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Khouloud Saadi , Di Wang

Looped Language Models (LoopLMs) perform multi-step latent reasoning prior to token generation and outperform conventional LLMs on reasoning benchmarks at smaller parameter budgets. However, attempts to further improve LoopLM reasoning with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jonathan Williams , Esin Tureci

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as the key driver for post-training complex reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet online RL introduces significant instability and computational overhead. Offline RL offers a compelling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Minjae Oh , Yunho Choi , Dongmin Choi , Yohan Jo

Existing Flow Matching (FM) text-to-image models suffer from two critical bottlenecks under multi-task alignment: the reward sparsity induced by scalar-valued rewards, and the gradient interference arising from jointly optimizing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Zhen Fang , Wenxuan Huang , Yu Zeng , Yiming Zhao , Shuang Chen , Kaituo Feng , Yunlong Lin , Lin Chen , Zehui Chen , Shaosheng Cao , Feng Zhao

While reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has advanced LLM reasoning in structured domains like mathematics and programming, its application to general-domain reasoning tasks remains challenging due to the absence of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Wenlin Zhong , Chengyuan Liu , Yiquan Wu , Bovin Tan , Changlong Sun , Yi Wang , Xiaozhong Liu , Kun Kuang

On-policy distillation has recently emerged as a promising alternative to standard sequence-level imitation, training a student by scoring its own rollouts with a teacher model. However, we observe ``Off-policy Teacher Decay'' problem in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Zhou Ziheng , Jiaqi Li , Huacong Tang , Ying Nian Wu , Demetri Terzopoulos

Large reasoning models (LRMs) extend large language models by generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, significantly improving mathematical and logical problem solving. However, this explicit reasoning process also introduces…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Jinghan Jia , Nathalie Baracaldo , Sijia Liu

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) reasoning have been largely attributed to the rise of reinforcement Learning (RL), which has shifted the community's focus away from the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) paradigm. Many studies…

A major drawback of reasoning models is their excessive token usage, inflating computational cost, resource demand, and latency. We show this verbosity stems not from deeper reasoning but from reinforcement learning loss minimization when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Mehdi Fatemi , Banafsheh Rafiee , Mingjie Tang , Kartik Talamadupula

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable success, yet they often suffer from producing unnecessary and verbose reasoning chains. We identify a core aspect of this issue as "invalid thinking" -- models tend to repeatedly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Zhengxiang Cheng , Dongping Chen , Mingyang Fu , Tianyi Zhou

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a practical, scalable way to improve large language models on math, code, and other structured tasks. However, we argue that many headline RLVR gains are not yet well validated…

Recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) demonstrate that sophisticated behaviors such as multi-step reasoning and self-reflection can emerge via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards~(\textit{RLVR}). However, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Jianhao Yan , Yafu Li , Zican Hu , Zhi Wang , Ganqu Cui , Xiaoye Qu , Yu Cheng , Yue Zhang

We investigate the explainability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies from a temporal perspective, focusing on the sequence of future outcomes associated with individual actions. In RL, value functions compress information about rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-08 Franco Ruggeri , Alessio Russo , Rafia Inam , Karl Henrik Johansson

On-policy distillation (OPD) has shown strong potential for transferring reasoning ability from frontier or domain-specific models to smaller students. While effective on static single-turn tasks, its behavior in multi-turn agent settings…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Jiaqi Wang , Wenhao Zhang , Weijie Shi , Yaliang Li , James Cheng

Chain-of-thought distillation is a powerful technique for transferring reasoning abilities from large language models (LLMs) to smaller student models. Previous methods typically require the student to mimic the step-by-step rationale…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Kaituo Feng , Changsheng Li , Xiaolu Zhang , Jun Zhou , Ye Yuan , Guoren Wang

Advanced reasoning typically requires Chain-of-Thought prompting, which is accurate but incurs prohibitive latency and substantial test-time inference costs. The standard alternative, fine-tuning smaller models, often sacrifices…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Sanket Badhe , Deep Shah

Large language models (LLMs) can now solve complex problems through long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, but the trade-off between performance and token cost remains a central challenge. To address this issue, supervised fine-tuning (SFT)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Kohsei Matsutani , Gouki Minegishi , Takeshi Kojima , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

Large language models trained with reinforcement learning (RL) for mathematical reasoning face a fundamental challenge: on problems the model cannot solve at all - "cliff" prompts - the RL gradient vanishes entirely, preventing any learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Ken Ding

In this paper we address the solution of the popular Wordle puzzle, using new reinforcement learning methods, which apply more generally to adaptive control of dynamic systems and to classes of Partially Observable Markov Decision Process…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Siddhant Bhambri , Amrita Bhattacharjee , Dimitri Bertsekas