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Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in LLM reasoning, but whether it can also improve direct recall of parametric knowledge remains an open question. We study this question in a controlled zero-shot, one-hop,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Wanli Yang , Hongyu Zang , Junwei Zhang , Wenjie Shi , Du Su , Jingang Wang , Xueqi Cheng , Fei Sun

Extensive research on formal verification of machine learning systems indicates that learning from data alone often fails to capture underlying background knowledge, such as specifications implicitly available in the data. Various neural…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Thomas Flinkow , Barak A. Pearlmutter , Rosemary Monahan

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has shown strong promise for LLM reasoning, but outcome-based RLVR remains inefficient on hard problems because correct final-answer rollouts are rare and sample-level credit assignment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Xitai Jiang , Zihan Tang , Wenze Lin , Yang Yue , Shenzhi Wang , Gao Huang

Rubric-based text evaluation increasingly uses large language models (LLMs) as scalable judges, but aligning frozen black-box models with human scoring standards remains challenging. We formulate this challenge as a criteria-transfer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yihan Hong , Huaiyuan Yao , Bolin Shen , Wanpeng Xu , Hua Wei , Yushun Dong

Rubric-based rewards offer a promising way to extend reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models beyond tasks with automatically verifiable answers. However, scaling rubric-based RL remains challenging: existing approaches often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Xiaoyuan Li , Keqin Bao , Moxin Li , Yubo Ma , Yichang Zhang , Wenjie Wang , Fuli Feng , Dayiheng Liu

Post-training for reasoning of large language models (LLMs) increasingly relies on verifiable rewards: deterministic checkers that provide 0-1 correctness signals. While reliable, such binary feedback is brittle--many tasks admit partially…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Leitian Tao , Ilia Kulikov , Swarnadeep Saha , Tianlu Wang , Jing Xu , Sharon Li , Jason E Weston , Ping Yu

Zero Reinforcement Learning (Zero-RL) has proven to be an effective approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by directly applying reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards on pretrained models,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Yuyuan Zeng , Yufei Huang , Can Xu , Qingfeng Sun , Jianfeng Yan , Guanghui Xu , Tao Yang , Fengzong Lian

This paper explores multiple optimization methods to improve the performance of rating-based reinforcement learning (RbRL). RbRL, a method based on the idea of human ratings, has been developed to infer reward functions in reward-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Evelyn Rose , Devin White , Mingkang Wu , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

Reward hacking--where agents exploit flaws in imperfect reward functions rather than performing tasks as intended--poses risks for AI alignment. Reward hacking has been observed in real training runs, with coding agents learning to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Mia Taylor , James Chua , Jan Betley , Johannes Treutlein , Owain Evans

We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-27 Nan Jiang , Lihong Li

Recent advances in aligning Large Language Models with human preferences have benefited from larger reward models and better preference data. However, most of these methodologies rely on the accuracy of the reward model. The reward models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Debangshu Banerjee , Aditya Gopalan

Reasoning with LLMs increasingly unfolds inside a broader verification loop. Internally, systems use cheap checks, such as self-consistency or proxy rewards, which we call weak verification. Externally, users inspect outputs and steer the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Shayan Kiyani , Sima Noorani , George Pappas , Hamed Hassani

Reward models (RMs) play a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, traditional RM training, which relies on response pairs tied to specific prompts, struggles to disentangle prompt-driven…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become central to post-training reasoning models, yet a key limitation of existing studies is their narrow view of the reasoning space: difficulty is treated as reasoning depth…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yihua Zhu , Qianying Liu , Fei Cheng , Jiaxin Wang , Akiko Aizawa , Sadao Kurohashi , Hidetoshi Shimodaira

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to infer a reward from expert demonstrations, motivated by the idea that the reward, rather than the policy, is the most succinct and transferable description of a task [Ng et al., 2000]. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Maryam Kamgarpour

Recent advancements in reasoning-focused language models such as OpenAI's O1 and DeepSeek-R1 have shown that scaling test-time computation-through chain-of-thought reasoning and iterative exploration-can yield substantial improvements on…

While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently emerged as a promising post-training paradigm for Large Language Models (LLMs), its dependency on the gold label or domain-specific verifiers limits its scalability to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Xuexiang Wen , Hang Yu , Linchao Zhu , Gaoang Wang

As the operations of autonomous systems generally affect simultaneously several users, it is crucial that their designs account for fairness considerations. In contrast to standard (deep) reinforcement learning (RL), we investigate the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-08-19 Umer Siddique , Paul Weng , Matthieu Zimmer

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…

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason often relies on Reinforcement Learning (RL) with task-specific verifiers. However, many real-world reasoning-intensive tasks lack verifiers, despite offering abundant expert demonstrations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Locke Cai , Ivan Provilkov