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Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have rapidly advanced from perception tasks to complex multi-step reasoning, yet reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) often leads to spurious reasoning since only the final-answer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Mengzhao Jia , Zhihan Zhang , Ignacio Cases , Zheyuan Liu , Meng Jiang , Peng Qi

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has led to impressive performance on a range of tasks, yet advanced instruction following (IF)-especially for complex, multi-turn, and system-prompted instructions-remains a significant…

The aim of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is to create systems capable of making autonomous decisions by learning from their environment through trial and error. This paper emphasizes the importance of reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Sinan Ibrahim , Mostafa Mostafa , Ali Jnadi , Hadi Salloum , Pavel Osinenko

In reinforcement learning from human feedback, preference-based reward models play a central role in aligning large language models to human-aligned behavior. However, recent studies show that these models are prone to reward hacking and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Wenqian Ye , Guangtao Zheng , Aidong Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful method for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Outcome-based RL, which rewards policies solely for the correctness of the final answer, yields substantial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Yuda Song , Julia Kempe , Remi Munos

Reinforcement learning (RL) has driven recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs), especially for tasks where rewards can be computed automatically, such as code generation. However, it is less effective in open-ended medical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Pengkai Wang , Pengwei Liu , Qi Zuo , Zhijie Sang , Congkai Xie , Hongxia Yang

Social networks are frequently polluted by rumors, which can be detected by advanced models such as graph neural networks. However, the models are vulnerable to attacks and understanding the vulnerabilities is critical to rumor detection in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Yuefei Lyu , Xiaoyu Yang , Jiaxin Liu , Philip S. Yu , Sihong Xie , Xi Zhang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), which uses simple binary feedback to post-train large language models, has found significant empirical success. However, a principled understanding of why it works is lacking. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Joe Suk , Yaqi Duan

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent from a reward function in a given environment, Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) seeks to recover the reward function from observing an expert's behavior. It is well known that, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Paul Rolland , Luca Viano , Norman Schuerhoff , Boris Nikolov , Volkan Cevher

We provide the first formal definition of reward hacking, a phenomenon where optimizing an imperfect proxy reward function leads to poor performance according to the true reward function. We say that a proxy is unhackable if increasing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Joar Skalse , Nikolaus H. R. Howe , Dmitrii Krasheninnikov , David Krueger

Reinforcement learning from human feedback usually models preferences using a reward function that does not distinguish between people. We argue that this is unlikely to be a good design choice in contexts with high potential for…

Reward Models (RMs) are crucial for online alignment of language models (LMs) with human preferences. However, RM-based preference-tuning is vulnerable to reward hacking, whereby LM policies learn undesirable behaviors from flawed RMs. By…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Daniel Fein , Max Lamparth , Violet Xiang , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Nick Haber

In the last decade, Deep Reinforcement Learning has evolved into a powerful tool for complex sequential decision-making problems. It combines deep learning's proficiency in processing rich input signals with reinforcement learning's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Julien Roy

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

Despite the success of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) in aligning language models with human values, reward hacking, also termed reward overoptimization, remains a critical challenge. This issue primarily arises from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Yuchun Miao , Sen Zhang , Liang Ding , Rong Bao , Lefei Zhang , Dacheng Tao

The effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in continuous control robotics tasks is mainly dependent on the design of the underlying reward function, which is highly prone to reward hacking. A misalignment between the reward…

Nowadays, training and evaluating DeepResearch-generated reports remain challenging due to the lack of verifiable reward signals. Accordingly, rubric-based evaluation has become a common practice. However, existing approaches either rely on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Changze Lv , Jie Zhou , Wentao Zhao , Jingwen Xu , Zisu Huang , Muzhao Tian , Shihan Dou , Tao Gui , Le Tian , Xiao Zhou , Xiaoqing Zheng , Xuanjing Huang , Jie Zhou

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning ability of large language models, yet training remains costly because many rollouts contribute little to optimization, considering the amount of computation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Yan Sun , Jia Guo , Stanley Kok , Zihao Wang , Zujie Wen , Zhiqiang Zhang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is an effective paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, existing RLVR methods utilize rollouts in an indiscriminate and short-horizon manner:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Xiaodong Lu , Xiaohan Wang , Jiajun Chai , Guojun Yin , Wei Lin , Zhijun Chen , Yu Luo , Fuzhen Zhuang , Yikun Ban , Deqing Wang

Recent advancements have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) can substantially improve the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). The effectiveness of such RL training, however, depends critically on the exploration space…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Haoyuan Wu , Hai Wang , Jiajia Wu , Jinxiang Ou , Keyao Wang , Weile Chen , Zihao Zheng , Bei Yu
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