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Reinforcement learning is the method of choice to train models in sampling-based setups with binary outcome feedback, such as navigation, code generation, and mathematical problem solving. In such settings, models implicitly induce a…

Reinforcement learning (RL) can refine the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), but critically depends on a key prerequisite: the LLM can already generate high-utility reasoning paths with non-negligible probability. For…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Tianqianjin Lin , Xi Zhao , Xingyao Zhang , Rujiao Long , Yi Xu , Zhuoren Jiang , Wenbo Su , Bo Zheng

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) for large language models is an energy-intensive endeavor: training can be unstable, and the policy may gradually drift away from its pretrained weights. We present \emph{RLEP}\, -- \,Reinforcement Learning with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Hongzhi Zhang , Jia Fu , Jingyuan Zhang , Kai Fu , Qi Wang , Fuzheng Zhang , Guorui Zhou

Frontier reasoning models have exhibited incredible capabilities across a wide array of disciplines, driven by posttraining large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL). However, despite the widespread success of this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Aayush Karan , Yilun Du

The inherent capabilities of a language model (LM) and the reasoning strategies it employs jointly determine its performance in reasoning tasks. While test-time scaling is regarded as an effective approach to tackling complex reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zhihong Pan , Kai Zhang , Yuze Zhao , Yupeng Han

Large Language Models (LLMs) that can continually improve beyond their training budgets are able to solve increasingly difficult problems by adapting at test time, a property we refer to as extrapolation. However, standard reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Ian Wu , Yuxiao Qu , Amrith Setlur , Aviral Kumar

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities in complex problem-solving tasks, sparking growing interest in their application to preference reasoning in recommendation systems. Existing methods typically…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Yang Zhang , Wenxin Xu , Xiaoyan Zhao , Wenjie Wang , Fuli Feng , Xiangnan He , Tat-Seng Chua

Reinforcement learning (RL) is emerging as a powerful paradigm for enabling large language models (LLMs) to perform complex reasoning tasks. Recent advances indicate that integrating RL with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) allows LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Wentao Jiang , Xiang Feng , Zengmao Wang , Yong Luo , Pingbo Xu , Zhe Chen , Bo Du , Jing Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) yields substantial improvements in large language models (LLMs) downstream task performance and alignment with human values. Surprisingly, such large gains result from updating only a small subnetwork comprising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Sagnik Mukherjee , Lifan Yuan , Dilek Hakkani-Tur , Hao Peng

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) techniques have yielded impressive reasoning improvements in language models, yet it remains unclear whether post-training truly extends a model's reasoning ability beyond what it acquires during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Charlie Zhang , Graham Neubig , Xiang Yue

Large Language Model (LLM) based listwise ranking has shown superior performance in many passage ranking tasks. With the development of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), many studies have demonstrated that step-by-step reasoning during…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Wenhan Liu , Xinyu Ma , Weiwei Sun , Yutao Zhu , Yuchen Li , Dawei Yin , Zhicheng Dou

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have recently shown promise in solving complex math problems when optimized with Reinforcement Learning (RL). But conventional approaches rely on outcome-only rewards that provide sparse feedback, resulting in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Tao He , Rongchuan Mu , Lizi Liao , Yixin Cao , Ming Liu , Bing Qin

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in training large language models (LLMs) for preventing unexpected outputs, eg reducing harmfulness and errors. However, existing RL methods mostly adopt the instance-level reward, which is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Zhipeng Chen , Kun Zhou , Wayne Xin Zhao , Junchen Wan , Fuzheng Zhang , Di Zhang , Ji-Rong Wen

Recent advances in reasoning-centric language models have highlighted reinforcement learning (RL) as a promising method for aligning models with verifiable rewards. However, it remains contentious whether RL truly expands a model's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Mingjie Liu , Shizhe Diao , Ximing Lu , Jian Hu , Xin Dong , Yejin Choi , Jan Kautz , Yi Dong

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become essential for eliciting complex reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the substantial memory overhead of storing Key-Value (KV) caches during long-horizon rollouts acts as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Sijia Luo , Xiaokang Zhang , Yuxuan Hu , Bohan Zhang , Ke Wang , Jinbo Su , Mengshu Sun , Lei Liang , Jing Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has increasingly become a pivotal technique in the post-training of large language models (LLMs). The effective exploration of the output space is essential for the success of RL. We observe that for complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Shihan Dou , Muling Wu , Jingwen Xu , Rui Zheng , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Efficiently acquiring external knowledge and up-to-date information is essential for effective reasoning and text generation in large language models (LLMs). Prompting advanced LLMs with reasoning capabilities to use search engines during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Bowen Jin , Hansi Zeng , Zhenrui Yue , Jinsung Yoon , Sercan Arik , Dong Wang , Hamed Zamani , Jiawei Han

We propose reinforcement learning (RL) strategies tailored for reasoning in large language models (LLMs) under strict memory and compute limits, with a particular focus on compatibility with LoRA fine-tuning. Building on early policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Alan Lee , Harry Tong

Through reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome correctness rewards, large reasoning models (LRMs) with scaled inference computation have demonstrated substantial success on complex reasoning tasks. However, the one-sided reward, focused…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Jiashu Yao , Heyan Huang , Shuang Zeng , Chuwei Luo , WangJie You , Jie Tang , Qingsong Liu , Yuhang Guo , Yangyang Kang