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Enhancing the complex reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) attracts widespread attention. While reinforcement learning (RL) has shown superior performance for improving complex reasoning, its impact on cross-lingual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Shulin Huang , Yiran Ding , Junshu Pan , Yue Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance on complex reasoning tasks, with reinforcement learning under verifiable rewards (RLVR) emerging as a principled framework for aligning model behavior with reasoning chains.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Yunjian Zhang , Sudong Wang , Yang Li , Peiran Xu , Conghao Zhou , Xiaoyue Ma , Jianing Li , Yao Zhu

We propose FlowRL: matching the full reward distribution via flow balancing instead of maximizing rewards in large language model (LLM) reinforcement learning (RL). Recent advanced reasoning models adopt reward-maximizing methods (\eg, PPO…

The performance of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters, with the learning rate being particularly influential. RL algorithms fail to reach convergence or demand an extensive number of samples…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Aida Afshar , Aldo Pacchiano

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is the predominant algorithm for training text generation models. This paradigm relies on direct supervision examples, which is not applicable to many emerging applications, such as generating adversarial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Han Guo , Bowen Tan , Zhengzhong Liu , Eric P. Xing , Zhiting Hu

We tackle the problem of aligning pre-trained large language models (LMs) with human preferences. If we view text generation as a sequential decision-making problem, reinforcement learning (RL) appears to be a natural conceptual framework.…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a prevailing approach for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. Among recent methods, GRPO stands out for its empirical success in training models such as DeepSeek-R1,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Wei Xiong , Jiarui Yao , Yuhui Xu , Bo Pang , Lei Wang , Doyen Sahoo , Junnan Li , Nan Jiang , Tong Zhang , Caiming Xiong , Hanze Dong

Existing methods to enhance the reasoning capability of large language models predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL) on reasoning-specific data. These approaches critically depend on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Qingyang Zhang , Haitao Wu , Changqing Zhang , Peilin Zhao , Yatao Bian

Reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly improved the reasoning ability of large language models. However, current reward models underperform in challenging reasoning scenarios and predominant RL training paradigms rely on rule-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Meng Zhou , Bei Li , Jiahao Liu , Xiaowen Shi , Yang Bai , Rongxiang Weng , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated potential in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but such training typically demands substantial efforts in creating and annotating data. In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Hangfan Zhang , Siyuan Xu , Zhimeng Guo , Huaisheng Zhu , Shicheng Liu , Xinrun Wang , Qiaosheng Zhang , Yang Chen , Peng Ye , Lei Bai , Shuyue Hu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently shown strong potential in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models and is now being actively extended to vision-language models (VLMs). However, existing RL applications in VLMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Yan Ma , Steffi Chern , Xuyang Shen , Yiran Zhong , Pengfei Liu

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) for chain-of-thought reasoning presents a significant challenge: supervised fine-tuning on a single "golden" rationale hurts generalization as it penalizes equally valid alternatives, whereas…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Mingye Zhu , Yi Liu , Zheren Fu , Quan Wang , Yongdong Zhang

While scaling laws for large language models (LLMs) during pre-training have been extensively studied, their behavior under reinforcement learning (RL) post-training remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a systematic empirical…

This paper aims to overcome a major obstacle in scaling RL for reasoning with LLMs, namely the collapse of policy entropy. Such phenomenon is consistently observed across vast RL runs without entropy intervention, where the policy entropy…

A promising approach for improving reasoning in large language models is to use process reward models (PRMs). PRMs provide feedback at each step of a multi-step reasoning trace, potentially improving credit assignment over outcome reward…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful approach to enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), while its mechanisms are not yet well understood. In this work, we undertake a…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in performing complex multi-step reasoning, yet they continue to struggle with mathematical reasoning, often making systematic errors. A promising solution is reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Hanning Zhang , Pengcheng Wang , Shizhe Diao , Yong Lin , Rui Pan , Hanze Dong , Dylan Zhang , Pavlo Molchanov , Tong Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for text generation. In particular, recent LLMs such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 can engage in fluent conversations with users after…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Jonathan D. Chang , Kiante Brantley , Rajkumar Ramamurthy , Dipendra Misra , Wen Sun

Mathematical reasoning is a key benchmark for large language models. Reinforcement learning is a standard post-training mechanism for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models, yet performance remains sensitive to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Arash Ahmadi , Sarah Sharif , Yaser , Banad

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key driver of progress in large language models, but scaling RL to long chain-of-thought (CoT) trajectories is increasingly constrained by backpropagation over every generated token. Even with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Hejian Sang , Yuanda Xu , Zhengze Zhou , Ran He , Zhipeng Wang