English
Related papers

Related papers: Exploration-Driven Optimization for Test-Time Larg…

200 papers

Effective exploration is a key challenge in reinforcement learning for large language models: discovering high-quality trajectories within a limited sampling budget from the vast natural language sequence space. Existing methods face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yiran Guo , Zhongjian Qiao , Yingqi Xie , Jie Liu , Dan Ye , Ruiqing Zhang , Shuang Qiu , Lijie Xu

Single-trajectory reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim to optimize policies from datasets consisting of (prompt, response, reward) triplets, where scalar rewards are directly available. This supervision format is highly practical, as it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Bilal Faye , Hanane Azzag , Mustapha Lebbah

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, particularly Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, in complex tasks, GRPO frequently…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Langlin Huang , Chengsong Huang , Jinyuan Li , Donghong Cai , Yuyi Yang , Jiaxin Huang

Large language models (LLMs) trained via pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can still produce harmful and misaligned outputs, or struggle in domains like math and coding. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhichao Wang , Kiran Ramnath , Bin Bi , Shiva Kumar Pentyala , Sougata Chaudhuri , Shubham Mehrotra , Zixu , Zhu , Xiang-Bo Mao , Sitaram Asur , Na , Cheng

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…

While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Rafael Rafailov , Archit Sharma , Eric Mitchell , Stefano Ermon , Christopher D. Manning , Chelsea Finn

We deploy large language models (LLMs) as business development (BD) agents for persuasive price negotiation in online travel agencies (OTAs). The agent must follow a multi-stage Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and strict guardrails (no…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Xia Zeng , Yihan Chen , Luhui Liu , Chao Luo , Ye Chen , Zhuoran Zhuang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in enhancing step-by-step reasoning through reinforcement learning. However, the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm, which relies on sparse reward rules, often…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Xingjian Zhang , Siwei Wen , Wenjun Wu , Lei Huang

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) traditionally relies on costly training and human preference annotations. Self-alignment seeks to reduce these expenses by enabling models to align themselves. To further lower costs and achieve…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-15 Somanshu Singla , Zhen Wang , Tianyang Liu , Abdullah Ashfaq , Zhiting Hu , Eric P. Xing

The Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a reinforcement learning method used to fine-tune large language models (LLMs), has proved its effectiveness in practical applications such as DeepSeek-R1. It raises a question whether GRPO can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Yanchen Xu , Ziheng Jiao , Hongyuan Zhang , Xuelong Li

Given the high computational cost of preference alignment training of large language models (LLMs), exploring efficient methods to reduce the training overhead remains an important and compelling research problem. Motivated by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Chujie Zheng , Ziqi Wang , Heng Ji , Minlie Huang , Nanyun Peng

While astonishingly capable, large Language Models (LLM) can sometimes produce outputs that deviate from human expectations. Such deviations necessitate an alignment phase to prevent disseminating untruthful, toxic, or biased information.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Long Tan Le , Han Shu , Tung-Anh Nguyen , Choong Seon Hong , Nguyen H. Tran

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven remarkably effective at improving the accuracy of language models in verifiable and deterministic domains like mathematics. Here, we examine if current RL methods are also effective at optimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Michael Bereket , Jure Leskovec

Enhancing the conformity of large language models (LLMs) to human preferences remains an ongoing research challenge. Recently, offline approaches such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have gained prominence as attractive options due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Kaihui Chen , Hao Yi , Qingyang Li , Tianyu Qi , Yulan Hu , Fuzheng Zhang , Yong Liu

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for tasks requiring complex reasoning, prompting significant interest in improving their reasoning abilities through post-training. Especially RL based methods using verifiable reward,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Prasanna Parthasarathi , Mathieu Reymond , Boxing Chen , Yufei Cui , Sarath Chandar

Recent advances of reasoning models, exemplified by OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek's R1, highlight the significant potential of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However,…

The enhancement of reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs) has garnered significant attention, with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning emerging as dominant paradigms. While recent studies recognize the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Zhijie Wang

In this work, we aim to incentivize the reasoning ability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) via reinforcement learning (RL) and develop an effective approach that mitigates the sparse reward and advantage vanishing issues during…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Huanjin Yao , Qixiang Yin , Jingyi Zhang , Min Yang , Yibo Wang , Wenhao Wu , Fei Su , Li Shen , Minghui Qiu , Dacheng Tao , Jiaxing Huang

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is an effective framework for aligning large language models with human preferences, but it struggles with complex reasoning tasks. DPO optimizes for the likelihood of generating preferred over…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Darsh Kachroo , Adriana Caraeni , Arjun Prasaath Anbazhagan , Brennan Lagasse , Kevin Zhu

Current reinforcement learning objectives for large-model reasoning primarily focus on maximizing expected rewards. This paradigm can lead to overfitting to dominant reward signals, while neglecting alternative yet valid reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Wendi Li , Sharon Li