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Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Meng Cao , Lei Shu , Lei Yu , Yun Zhu , Nevan Wichers , Yinxiao Liu , Lei Meng

Listwise reranking utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) has achieved state-of-the-art retrieval effectiveness. Recently, reasoning-enhanced models have further pushed these boundaries by employing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to perform deep…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Danyang Liu , Kan Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) training of large language models (LLMs) on unverifiable tasks is challenging even when a reasonable-quality reference answer is available. We propose a constrained RL training framework that (i) optimizes a…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a key method for improving Large Language Models' reasoning capabilities, yet recent evidence suggests it may paradoxically shrink the reasoning boundary rather than…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Phuc Minh Nguyen , Chinh D. La , Duy M. H. Nguyen , Nitesh V. Chawla , Binh T. Nguyen , Khoa D. Doan

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

Reasoning has emerged as the next major frontier for language models (LMs), with rapid advances from both academic and industrial labs. However, this progress often outpaces methodological rigor, with many evaluations relying on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Andreas Hochlehnert , Hardik Bhatnagar , Vishaal Udandarao , Samuel Albanie , Ameya Prabhu , Matthias Bethge

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental framework for sequential decision-making, in which an agent learns an optimal policy through interactions with an unknown environment. In settings with function approximation, many existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ruiquan Huang , Donghao Li , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on complex reasoning tasks, especially when equipped with long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, eliciting long CoT typically requires large-scale reinforcement…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Huiyuan Lai , Malvina Nissim

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a transformative approach for aligning and enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs), addressing critical challenges in instruction following, ethical alignment, and reasoning capabilities. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Saksham Sahai Srivastava , Vaneet Aggarwal

Sequence prediction models can be learned from example sequences with a variety of training algorithms. Maximum likelihood learning is simple and efficient, yet can suffer from compounding error at test time. Reinforcement learning such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Bowen Tan , Zhiting Hu , Zichao Yang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Eric Xing

Large reasoning models (LRMs) substantially outperform their base LLM counterparts on challenging reasoning benchmarks, yet it remains poorly understood where base models go wrong during token-by-token generation and how to narrow this gap…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Changshuo Shen , Leheng Sheng , Yuxin Chen , An Zhang , Xiang Wang

Video reasoning using Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) relies on costly reinforcement learning (RL) and verbose chain-of-thought, resulting in substantial computational overhead during both training and inference. Moreover, the mechanisms…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Deepak Sridhar , Kartikeya Bhardwaj , Jeya Pradha Jeyaraj , Nuno Vasconcelos , Ankita Nayak , Harris Teague

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as the de-facto paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). We have developed RLAX, a scalable RL framework on TPUs. RLAX employs a parameter-server…

Reinforcement learning has become a central paradigm for improving LLM reasoning, but most existing methods optimize policies over discrete token sequences. This creates a mismatch between the optimization space and the structure of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Haoqiang Kang , Yizhe Zhang , Nikki Lijing Kuang , Yi-An Ma , Lianhui Qin

Reasoning in large language models has long been a central research focus, and recent studies employing reinforcement learning (RL) have introduced diverse methods that yield substantial performance gains with minimal or even no external…

Recent studies show that the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) can be improved by applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) to question-answering (QA) tasks in areas such as math and coding. With a long context length, LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Stephen Chung , Wenyu Du , Jie Fu

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs), particularly for complex reasoning tasks, yet it often suffers from exploration collapse: policies prematurely concentrate on a small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Zhiyuan Hu , Yucheng Wang , Yufei He , Jiaying Wu , Yilun Zhao , See-Kiong Ng , Cynthia Breazeal , Anh Tuan Luu , Hae Won Park , Bryan Hooi

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a principled way to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models, yet its effectiveness hinges on training signals that remain informative as models evolve. In practice, RL progress often…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Caijun Xu , Changyi Xiao , Zhongyuan Peng , Xinrun Wang , Yixin Cao

In recent years, training methods centered on Reinforcement Learning (RL) have markedly enhanced the reasoning and alignment performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in understanding human intents, following user…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Keliang Liu , Dingkang Yang , Ziyun Qian , Weijie Yin , Yuchi Wang , Hongsheng Li , Jun Liu , Peng Zhai , Yang Liu , Lihua Zhang