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Alignment faking (AF) occurs when an LLM strategically complies with training objectives to avoid value modification, reverting to prior preferences once monitoring is lifted. Current detection methods focus on conversational settings and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Matteo Leonesi , Francesco Belardinelli , Flavio Corradini , Marco Piangerelli

LLM deployment in critical domains is currently impeded by persistent hallucinations--generating plausible but factually incorrect assertions. While scaling laws drove significant improvements in general capabilities, theoretical frameworks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Jiayun Wu , Jiashuo Liu , Zhiyuan Zeng , Tianyang Zhan , Tianle Cai , Wenhao Huang

Current benchmarks are inadequate for evaluating progress in reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs).Despite recent benchmark gains reported for RL, we find that training on these benchmarks' training sets achieves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zihan Chen , Yiming Zhang , Hengguang Zhou , Zenghui Ding , Yining Sun , Cho-Jui Hsieh

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a foundational algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). For nearly forty years, TD learning has served as a workhorse for applied RL as well as a building block for more complex and specialized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Hwanwoo Kim , Panos Toulis , Eric Laber

Training models to effectively use test-time compute is crucial for improving the reasoning performance of LLMs. Current methods mostly do so via fine-tuning on search traces or running RL with 0/1 outcome reward, but do these approaches…

Reinforcement learning has become the standard for improving reasoning in large language models, yet evidence increasingly suggests that RL does not teach new strategies; it redistributes probability mass over solutions the base model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Ömer Faruk Akgül , Rajgopal Kannan , Willie Neiswanger , Viktor Prasanna

RL training of multi-turn LLM agents is inherently unstable, and reasoning quality directly determines task performance. Entropy is widely used to track reasoning stability. However, entropy only measures diversity within the same input,…

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful technique to make large language models (LLMs) more capable in complex settings. RLHF proceeds as collecting human preference data, training a reward model on said…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Nathan Lambert , Roberto Calandra

Reasoning in large language models has long been a central research focus, and recent studies employing reinforcement learning (RL) have introduced diverse methods that yield substantial performance gains with minimal or even no external…

This work introduces a novel framework for evaluating LLMs' capacity to balance instruction-following with critical reasoning when presented with multiple-choice questions containing no valid answers. Through systematic evaluation across…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Gracjan Góral , Emilia Wiśnios , Piotr Sankowski , Paweł Budzianowski

Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) enables large language models (LLMs) to improve their internal reasoning ability by integrating external tools. However, models employing TIR often display suboptimal behaviors, such as insufficient or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Yifei Chen , Guanting Dong , Zhicheng Dou

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is typically formulated as maximizing entropy subject to matching the distribution of expert trajectories. Classical (dual-ascent) IRL guarantees monotonic performance improvement but requires fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Anish Diwan , Davide Tateo , Christopher E. Mower , Haitham Bou-Ammar , Jan Peters , Oleg Arenz

Improving embodied reasoning in multimodal-large-language models (MLLMs) is essential for building vision-language-action models (VLAs) on top of them to readily translate multimodal understanding into low-level actions. Accordingly, recent…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Dongyoung Kim , Sumin Park , Woomin Song , Seungku Kim , Taeyoung Kim , Huiwon Jang , Jinwoo Shin , Jaehyung Kim , Younggyo Seo

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has significantly improved reasoning in large language models (LLMs), yet the token-level mechanisms underlying these improvements remain unclear. We present a systematic empirical study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Haoming Meng , Kexin Huang , Shaohang Wei , Chiyu Ma , Shuo Yang , Xue Wang , Guoyin Wang , Bolin Ding , Jingren Zhou

LLMs often exhibit Aha moments such as self-correction after tokens like "Wait," yet the underlying mechanism remains unclear. Standard LLMs collapse mainly through silent divergence, where trajectories drift from the correct answer yet…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Jeonghye Kim , Xufang Luo , Minbeom Kim , Sangmook Lee , Dongsheng Li , Yuqing Yang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While RL has demonstrated substantial performance gains, it still faces key challenges, including low…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Yihang Yao , Guangtao Zeng , Raina Wu , Yang Zhang , Ding Zhao , Zhang-Wei Hong , Chuang Gan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), encounter the challenge of distribution shift. Current approaches typically address this issue…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Qiyuan Deng , Xuefeng Bai , Kehai Chen , Yaowei Wang , Liqiang Nie , Min Zhang

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has focused on test-time scaling to improve reasoning via increased inference computation, but often at the cost of efficiency. We revisit test-time behavior and uncover a simple yet…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Zhen Yang , Mingyang Zhang , Feng Chen , Ganggui Ding , Liang Hou , Xin Tao , Ying-Cong Chen

Hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) are outputs that are syntactically coherent but factually incorrect or contextually inconsistent. They are persistent obstacles in high-stakes industrial settings such as engineering design,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Brian Freeman , Adam Kicklighter , Matt Erdman , Zach Gordon

Specification gaming under Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to cause LLMs to develop sycophantic, manipulative, or deceptive behavior, yet the conditions under which this occurs remain unclear. We train 11 instruction-tuned LLMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Leon Eshuijs , Shihan Wang , Antske Fokkens