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When language models (LMs) are trained via reinforcement learning (RL) to generate natural language "reasoning chains", their performance improves on a variety of difficult question answering tasks. Today, almost all successful applications…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Mehul Damani , Isha Puri , Stewart Slocum , Idan Shenfeld , Leshem Choshen , Yoon Kim , Jacob Andreas

Language models often struggle to follow multi-constraint instructions that are crucial for real-world applications. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches suffer from dependency on external supervision and sparse reward signals…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Qingyu Ren , Qianyu He , Powei Chang , Jie Zeng , Zeye Sun , Fei Yu , Jiaqing Liang , Yanghua Xiao

For sparse, structured reinforcement-learning tasks with semantic reward-function interfaces, LLM-generated reward shaping is better framed as debugging than one-shot generation. We study PPO-trained agents using MiniGrid as core evaluation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Youting Wang , Yuan Tang , Bowen Liu , Xuan Liu , Dingyan Shang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for solving various control, optimization, and sequential decision making tasks. However, designing reward functions for complex tasks (e.g., with multiple objectives and safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-23 Xuan Zhao , Marcos Campos

Diffusion and flow-matching models scale because pretraining is supervised regression: a clean sample is noised analytically, and a model regresses against a closed-form target. RL post-training aligns the model with a reward. In image…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Andreas Bergmeister , Stefanie Jegelka , Nikolas Nüsken , Carles Domingo-Enrich , Jakiw Pidstrigach

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

A reinforcement learning (RL) framework is introduced for the efficient synthesis of quantum circuits that generate specified target quantum states from a fixed initial state, addressing a central challenge in both the Noisy…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-02-18 Sara Giordano , Kornikar Sen , Miguel A. Martin-Delgado

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function. However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise. Can we devise RL algorithms that instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Reinforcement learning has become a central paradigm for improving LLM reasoning, but most existing methods optimize policies over discrete token sequences. This creates a mismatch between the optimization space and the structure of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Haoqiang Kang , Yizhe Zhang , Nikki Lijing Kuang , Yi-An Ma , Lianhui Qin

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) enhances the reasoning of large language models (LLMs), but standard RLVR often depends on human-annotated answers or carefully curated reward specifications. In machine-checkable…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Xinjie Chen , Biao Fu , Jing Wu , Guoxin Chen , Xinggao Liu , Dayiheng Liu , Minpeng Liao

The reward signal plays a central role in defining the desired behaviors of agents in reinforcement learning (RL). Rewards collected from realistic environments could be perturbed, corrupted, or noisy due to an adversary, sensor error, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Xi Chen , Zhihui Zhu , Andrew Perrault

Associative thinking--the ability to connect seemingly unrelated ideas--is a foundational element of human creativity and problem-solving. This paper explores whether reinforcement learning (RL) guided by associative thinking principles can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mukul Singh , Ananya Singha , Aishni Parab , Pronita Mehrotra , Sumit Gulwani

Diffusion-based large language models offer a non-autoregressive alternative for text generation, but enabling them to perform complex reasoning remains challenging. Reinforcement learning has recently emerged as an effective post-training…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Shaoan Xie , Lingjing Kong , Xiangchen Song , Xinshuai Dong , Guangyi Chen , Eric P. Xing , Kun Zhang

Reward design in reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging since specifying human notions of desired behavior may be difficult via reward functions or require many expert demonstrations. Can we instead cheaply design rewards using a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Minae Kwon , Sang Michael Xie , Kalesha Bullard , Dorsa Sadigh

Language models trained with reinforcement learning (RL) can engage in reward hacking--the exploitation of unintended strategies for high reward--without revealing this behavior in their chain-of-thought reasoning. This makes the detection…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Miles Turpin , Andy Arditi , Marvin Li , Joe Benton , Julian Michael

Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) methods such as RL$^2$ have emerged as promising approaches for learning data-efficient RL algorithms tailored to a given task distribution. However, they show poor asymptotic performance and struggle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Abhinav Bhatia , Samer B. Nashed , Shlomo Zilberstein

While reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is effective to improve the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), its reliance on human-annotated labels leads to the scaling up dilemma, especially for complex tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Zizhuo Zhang , Jianing Zhu , Xinmu Ge , Zihua Zhao , Zhanke Zhou , Xuan Li , Xiao Feng , Jiangchao Yao , Bo Han

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown its strength in challenging sequential decision-making problems. The reward function in RL is crucial to the learning performance, as it serves as a measure of the task completion degree. In real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Siyuan Li , Shijie Han , Yingnan Zhao , By Liang , Peng Liu

This paper investigates the role of explicit thinking process in rule-based reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) for MLLMs. We first propose CLS-RL for MLLM image classification, using verifiable rewards for fine-tuning. Experiments show CLS-RL…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Ming Li , Jike Zhong , Shitian Zhao , Yuxiang Lai , Haoquan Zhang , Wang Bill Zhu , Kaipeng Zhang

Diffusion models have been widely studied for removing unsafe content learned during pre-training. Existing methods require expensive supervised data, either unsafe-text paired with safe-image groundtruth or negative/positive image pairs,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Komal Kumar , Ankan Deria , Abhishek Basu , Fahad Shamshad , Hisham Cholakkal , Karthik Nandakumar