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Related papers: Reward Hacking in Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learn…

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Training language models via reinforcement learning often relies on imperfect proxy rewards, since ground truth rewards that precisely define the intended behavior are rarely available. Standard metrics for assessing the quality of proxy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Shuning Shang , Hubert Strauss , Stanley Wei , Sanjeev Arora , Noam Razin

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) scales the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) but remains bottlenecked by limited labeled samples for continued data scaling. Reinforcement learning with intrinsic rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Chuyi Tan , Peiwen Yuan , Xinglin Wang , Yiwei Li , Shaoxiong Feng , Yueqi Zhang , Jiayi Shi , Ji Zhang , Boyuan Pan , Yao Hu , Kan Li

Recent advances at the intersection of reinforcement learning (RL) and visual intelligence have enabled agents that not only perceive complex visual scenes but also reason, generate, and act within them. This survey offers a critical and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Weijia Wu , Chen Gao , Joya Chen , Kevin Qinghong Lin , Qingwei Meng , Yiming Zhang , Yuke Qiu , Hong Zhou , Mike Zheng Shou

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard paradigm for refining large language models (LLMs) beyond pre-training and instruction tuning. A prominent line of work is RL with verifiable rewards (RLVR), which leverages automatically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Bonan Zhang , Zhongqi Chen , Bowen Song , Qinya Li , Fan Wu , Guihai Chen

Recent work on reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has shown that large language models (LLMs) can be substantially improved using outcome-level verification signals, such as unit tests for code or exact-match checks for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Massimiliano Pronesti , Anya Belz , Yufang Hou

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has significantly advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) in verifiable domains, but aligning models for open-ended generation remains profoundly challenging due to the lack of definitive rewards. Current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Xin Guan , Xiaomeng Hu , Shen Huang , Zhenyi Wang , Bo Zhang , Zijian Li , Pengjun Xie , Bo Liu , Jiuxin Cao

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), but most existing approaches rely on sparse outcome-level feedback. This sparsity creates a credit assignment…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Huining Yuan , Zelai Xu , Huaijie Wang , Xiangmin Yi , Jiaxuan Gao , Xiao-Ping Zhang , Yu Wang , Chao Yu , Yi Wu

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and Rubrics as Rewards (RaR) have driven strong gains in domains with clear correctness signals and even in subjective domains by synthesizing evaluation criteria from ideal reference…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Wisdom Ikezogwo , Mehmet Saygin Seyfioglu , Ranjay Krishna , Karim Bouyarmane

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in aligning large language models with human preferences, inspiring the development of reward-centric diffusion reinforcement learning (RDRL) to achieve similar…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Kwanyoung Kim , Byeongsu Sim

Pointwise reward modeling offers critical signals for LLM post-training, yet struggles with absolute scoring in subjective, non-verifiable settings. Rubric-based methods address this by decomposing evaluation into explicit criteria, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Haoxiang Jiang , Zihan Dong , Tianci Liu , Wanying Wang , Ran Xu , Tony Yu , Linjun Zhang , Haoyu Wang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves final-answer accuracy on reasoning tasks, but it does not reliably improve reasoning quality. Because outcome rewards only assess final answers, they also reward spurious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Chenlu Ye , Zhou Yu , Ziji Zhang , Hao Chen , Narayanan Sadagopan , Jing Huang , Tong Zhang , Anurag Beniwal

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and related alignment paradigms have become central to steering large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) toward human-preferred behaviors. However, these…

Reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome-based rewards has proven effective for improving large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, its success often depends on the base model occasionally sampling correct solutions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jatin Prakash , Anirudh Buvanesh

Despite recent progress in Large Language Model (LLM) Agents for Software Engineering (SWE) tasks, end-to-end fine-tuning typically relies on verifiable terminal rewards such as whether all unit tests pass. While these binary signals…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Jiawei Huang , Qingping Yang , Renjie Zheng , Jiaze Chen

Recent advances in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) show that large language models enhance their reasoning abilities when trained with verifiable signals. However, due to reward sparsity, effectiveness depends heavily…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Sanghwan Bae , Jiwoo Hong , Min Young Lee , Hanbyul Kim , JeongYeon Nam , Donghyun Kwak

While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has shown strong effectiveness in reasoning tasks, it cannot be directly applied to non-verifiable domains lacking ground-truth verifiers, such as LLM alignment. In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Kejian Shi , Yixin Liu , Peifeng Wang , Alexander R. Fabbri , Shafiq Joty , Arman Cohan

Recent advances highlight Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) as a promising method for enhancing LLMs' capabilities. However, it remains unclear whether the current practice of RLVR truly expands a model's reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Fang Wu , Weihao Xuan , Ximing Lu , Mingjie Liu , Yi Dong , Zaid Harchaoui , Yejin Choi

Conventional reward modeling relies on gradient descent over neural weights, creating opaque, data-hungry "black boxes." We propose a paradigm shift from implicit to explicit reward parameterization, recasting optimization from continuous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Lipeng Xie , Sen Huang , Zhuo Zhang , Anni Zou , Yunpeng Zhai , Dingchao Ren , Kezun Zhang , Haoyuan Hu , Boyin Liu , Haoran Chen , Zhaoyang Liu , Bolin Ding

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated promising gains in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, its dependence on domain-specific verifiers significantly restricts its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Chongxuan Huang , Lei Lin , Xiaodong Shi , Wenping Hu , Ruiming Tang