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Search-augmented large language models (LLMs) trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved strong results on open-domain question answering (QA), but training still remains a significant challenge. The optimization is often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Yutao Xie , Nathaniel Thomas , Nicklas Hansen , Yang Fu , Li Erran Li , Xiaolong Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with maintaining coherent multi-step reasoning traces, particularly in tasks that require a structured logical flow. This work introduces a quantum-inspired approach to address the challenge by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Venkat Margapuri , Garik Kazanjian , Naren Kosaraju

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have accelerated progress toward artificial general intelligence, with inference-time scaling emerging as a key technique. Contemporary approaches leverage either sequential reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Zenan Xu , Zexuan Qiu , Guanhua Huang , Kun Li , Siheng Li , Chenchen Zhang , Kejiao Li , Qi Yi , Yuhao Jiang , Bo Zhou , Fengzong Lian , Zhanhui Kang

We study the cross-entropy method (CEM) for the non-convex optimization of a continuous and parameterized objective function and introduce a differentiable variant that enables us to differentiate the output of CEM with respect to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Brandon Amos , Denis Yarats

Large language models (LLMs) can use in-context demonstrations to improve performance on zero-shot tasks. However, selecting the best in-context examples is challenging because model performance can vary widely depending on the selected…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Dan Iter , Reid Pryzant , Ruochen Xu , Shuohang Wang , Yang Liu , Yichong Xu , Chenguang Zhu

Large language models (LLMs) trained with reinforcement objectives often achieve superficially correct answers via shortcut strategies, pairing correct outputs with spurious or unfaithful reasoning and degrading under small causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xiangqi Wang , Yue Huang , Yujun Zhou , Xiaonan Luo , Kehan Guo , Xiangliang Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs), but the widely used Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) often suffers from entropy collapse: exploration quickly disappears, policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Chen Wang , Zhaochun Li , Jionghao Bai , Hexuan Deng , Ge Lan , Yue Wang

Entropy minimization (EM) trains the model to concentrate even more probability mass on its most confident outputs. We show that this simple objective alone, without any labeled data, can substantially improve large language models' (LLMs)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Shivam Agarwal , Zimin Zhang , Lifan Yuan , Jiawei Han , Hao Peng

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is a key technique for enabling complex reasoning in large language models. However, generating full, fixed-length rationales is computationally wasteful, inflating both token usage and latency. We introduce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Mohammad Atif Quamar , Mohammad Areeb

Trajectory optimizers for model-based reinforcement learning, such as the Cross-Entropy Method (CEM), can yield compelling results even in high-dimensional control tasks and sparse-reward environments. However, their sampling inefficiency…

Continual learning aims to acquire new tasks while preserving performance on previously learned ones, but most methods struggle with catastrophic forgetting. Existing approaches typically treat all layers uniformly, often trading stability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Hengyi Wu , Zhenyi Wang , Heng Huang

Effectively training Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex, long-CoT reasoning is often bottlenecked by the need for massive high-quality reasoning data. Existing methods are either computationally expensive or fail to reliably…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Xiaoyuan Li , Yubo Ma , Chengpeng Li , Fengbin Zhu , Yiyao Yu , Keqin Bao , Wenjie Wang , Fuli Feng , Dayiheng Liu

The reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have improved substantially through increased test-time computation, typically in the form of intermediate tokens known as chain-of-thought (CoT). However, CoT often becomes…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Nathanaël Carraz Rakotonirina , Ren Pang , Neha Anna John , Michael Bohlke-Schneider , Momchil Hardalov

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities when trained with chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision. However, the long and verbose CoT traces, especially those distilled from large reasoning models (LRMs) such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Jinghan Jia , Hadi Reisizadeh , Chongyu Fan , Nathalie Baracaldo , Mingyi Hong , Sijia Liu

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have recently achieved strong mathematical and code reasoning performance through Reinforcement Learning (RL) post-training. However, we show that modern reasoning post-training induces an unintended…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Wenhui Tan , Fiorenzo Parascandolo , Enver Sangineto , Jianzhong Ju , Zhenbo Luo , Qian Cao , Rita Cucchiara , Ruihua Song , Jian Luan

Recent reasoning large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1, exhibit strong performance on complex tasks through test-time inference scaling. However, prior studies have shown that these models often incur significant…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Wai Man Si , Mingjie Li , Michael Backes , Yang Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise as intelligent agents in interactive decision-making tasks. Traditional approaches often depend on meticulously designed prompts, high-quality examples, or additional reward models for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Muning Wen , Junwei Liao , Cheng Deng , Jun Wang , Weinan Zhang , Ying Wen

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, generating high-quality text that balances coherence, diversity, and relevance remains challenging. Traditional…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Jaydip Sen , Rohit Pandey , Hetvi Waghela

Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has become a common choice in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs). Considering existing RL-based finetuning methods, entropy intervention turns out to be an effective…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-13 Yang Yu , Zhuangzhuang Chen , Siqi Wang , Lanqing Li , Xiaomeng Li

Existing studies have introduced method-based reasoning and scope extension as approaches to enhance Large Language Model (LLM) performance beyond direct matrix mappings. Building on these foundations, this paper summarizes and integrates…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Hong Su