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In practice, rigorous reasoning is often a key driver of correct code, while Reinforcement Learning (RL) for code generation often neglects optimizing reasoning quality. Bringing process-level supervision into RL is appealing, but it faces…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Lishui Fan , Yu Zhang , Mouxiang Chen , Zhongxin Liu

Academic benchmarks for coding agents tend to reward autonomous task completion, measured by verifiable rewards such as unit-test success. In contrast, real-world coding agents operate with humans in the loop, where success signals are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Xingyao Wang , Valerie Chen , Heng Ji , Graham Neubig

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) on chain-of-thought reasoning has become a standard part of language model post-training recipes. A common assumption is that the reasoning chains trained through RLVR reliably represent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Qinan Yu , Alexa Tartaglini , Peter Hase , Carlos Guestrin , Christopher Potts

Reward models (RMs) play a crucial role in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), aligning model behavior with human preferences. However, existing benchmarks for reward models show a weak correlation with the performance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Sunghwan Kim , Dongjin Kang , Taeyoon Kwon , Hyungjoo Chae , Dongha Lee , Jinyoung Yeo

Rubric-based evaluation has become a prevailing paradigm for evaluating instruction following in large language models (LLMs). Despite its widespread use, the reliability of these rubric-level evaluations remains unclear, calling for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Tianjun Pan , Xuan Lin , Wenyan Yang , Qianyu He , Shisong Chen , Licai Qi , Wanqing Xu , Hongwei Feng , Bo Xu , Yanghua Xiao

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a prominent method for post-training Large Language Models (LLMs). However, verifiers are rarely error-free; even deterministic checks can be inaccurate, and the growing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Andreas Plesner , Francisco Guzmán , Anish Athalye

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has driven recent progress in code large language models by leveraging execution-based feedback from unit tests, but its scalability is fundamentally constrained by the availability and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Xiao Zhu , Xinyu Zhou , Boyu Zhu , Hanxu Hu , Mingzhe Du , Haotian Zhang , Huiming Wang , Zhijiang Guo

Large language models (LLMs) make reward design in reinforcement learning substantially more scalable, but generated rewards are not automatically reliable training objectives. Existing work has focused primarily on generating, evolving, or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Feiyu Wu , Xu Zheng , Zhuocheng Wang , Yi ming Dai , Hui Li

In Reward Learning (ReL), we are given feedback on an unknown target reward, and the goal is to use this information to recover it in order to carry out some downstream application, e.g., planning. When the feedback is not informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Filippo Lazzati , Alberto Maria Metelli

Large language models (LLMs) can act as both problem solvers and solution verifiers, where the latter select high-quality answers from a pool of solver-generated candidates. This raises the question of under what conditions verification…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Jack Lu , Ryan Teehan , Jinran Jin , Mengye Ren

Strong worst-case performance bounds for episodic reinforcement learning exist but fortunately in practice RL algorithms perform much better than such bounds would predict. Algorithms and theory that provide strong problem-dependent bounds…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Andrea Zanette , Emma Brunskill

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves reasoning in large language models but treats all correct solutions equally, potentially reinforcing flawed traces that get correct answers by chance. We observe that better…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Tiehua Mei , Minxuan Lv , Leiyu Pan , Zhenpeng Su , Hongru Hou , Hengrui Chen , Ao Xu , Deqing Yang

Process Reward Models (PRMs) are rapidly becoming the backbone of LLM reasoning pipelines, yet we demonstrate that state-of-the-art PRMs are systematically exploitable under adversarial optimization pressure. To address this, we introduce a…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated and sometimes trained using automated graders such as LLM-as-judges that output scalar scores or preferences. While convenient, these approaches are often opaque: a single score rarely…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Kaustubh D. Dhole , Eugene Agichtein

Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Aviral Kumar , Xue Bin Peng , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Existing research has predominantly concentrated on isolated reasoning domains such as mathematical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Yu Li , Zhuoshi Pan , Honglin Lin , Mengyuan Sun , Conghui He , Lijun Wu

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is crucial for aligning large language models with human preferences. While recent research has focused on algorithmic improvements, the importance of prompt-data construction has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Wei Shen , Guanlin Liu , Zheng Wu , Ruofei Zhu , Qingping Yang , Chao Xin , Yu Yue , Lin Yan

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in autonomous cyber defence agents trained to defend computer networks using deep reinforcement learning. These agents are typically trained in cyber gym environments using dense, highly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Elizabeth Bates , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

State-of-the-art neural network verifiers operate by encoding neural network verification as constraint satisfaction problems. When dealing with standard piecewise-linear activation functions, such as ReLUs, verifiers typically employ…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Maya Swisa , Guy Katz