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Related papers: Value-Gradient Hypothesis of RL for LLMs

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Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a prevailing approach for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. Among recent methods, GRPO stands out for its empirical success in training models such as DeepSeek-R1,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Wei Xiong , Jiarui Yao , Yuhui Xu , Bo Pang , Lei Wang , Doyen Sahoo , Junnan Li , Nan Jiang , Tong Zhang , Caiming Xiong , Hanze Dong

Large language models (LLMs) excel in tasks like question answering and dialogue, but complex tasks requiring interaction, such as negotiation and persuasion, require additional long-horizon reasoning and planning. Reinforcement learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Joey Hong , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine

Large language models (LLMs) acquire extensive prior knowledge through large-scale pretraining and can be further enhanced via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training. A growing body of evidence has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Honglin Zhang , Qianyue Hao , Fengli Xu , Yong Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful post-training technique to incentivize the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). However, LLMs can respond very inconsistently to RL finetuning: some show substantial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Zhepeng Cen , Yihang Yao , William Han , Zuxin Liu , Ding Zhao

Humans are masters at quickly learning many complex tasks, relying on an approximate understanding of the dynamics of their environments. In much the same way, we would like our learning agents to quickly adapt to new tasks. In this paper,…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (\textbf{RLHF}) has emerged as a dominant approach for aligning LLM outputs with human preferences. Inspired by the success of RLHF, we study the performance of multiple algorithms that learn from…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective approach for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). The Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) family has demonstrated strong…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Chenxi Liu , Junjie Liang , Yuqi Jia , Bochuan Cao , Yang Bai , Heng Huang , Xun Chen

Reinforcement learning (RL) enhances large language models (LLMs) in complex, long-chain-of-thought (long-CoT) reasoning. The advanced VAPO framework, despite sophisticated mechanisms like Decoupled GAE, theoretically faces fundamental…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Jintian Shao , Yiming Cheng

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) significantly enhances the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). Current RLVR approaches typically conduct training across all generated tokens, but neglect to explore…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Yiliu Sun , Zicheng Zhao , Yang Wei , Yanfang Zhang , Chen Gong

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these methods are fundamentally constrained by the ''learning cliff''…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Xichen Zhang , Sitong Wu , Yinghao Zhu , Haoru Tan , Shaozuo Yu , Ziyi He , Jiaya Jia

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards can improve LLM reasoning, but learning remains sample-inefficient when terminal rewards are sparse. This has motivated a growing line of work on RL with textual feedback, where a critic model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Utsav Singh , Sidhaarth Sredharan , Souradip Chakraborty , Amrit Singh Bedi

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is highly effective for post-training autoregressive (AR) language models, yet its direct application to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) often triggers reward collapse. We identify two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Jianyuan Zhong , Kaibo Wang , Ding Ding , Zijin Feng , Haoli Bai , Yang Xiang , Jiacheng Sun , Qiang Xu

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), which uses simple binary feedback to post-train large language models, has found significant empirical success. However, a principled understanding of why it works is lacking. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Joe Suk , Yaqi Duan

Traditional RL algorithms like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) typically train on the entire rollout buffer, operating under the assumption that all generated episodes provide a beneficial optimization signal. However, these episodes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Dong Shu , Denghui Zhang , Jessica Hullman

Reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome-based rewards has proven effective for improving large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, its success often depends on the base model occasionally sampling correct solutions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jatin Prakash , Anirudh Buvanesh

Post-training with Reinforcement Learning (RL) has substantially improved reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) via test-time scaling. However, extending this paradigm to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) through verbose rationales yields limited…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Bangzheng Li , Jianmo Ni , Chen Qu , Ian Miao , Liu Yang , Xingyu Fu , Muhao Chen , Derek Zhiyuan Cheng

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) highlight the importance of post training techniques for improving reasoning and mathematical ability. Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has shown promise in this domain by combining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Gabriele Carrino , Andrea Sassella , Nicolo Brunello , Federico Toschi , Mark James Carman

Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce plausible but poorly-calibrated answers, limiting their reliability on reasoning-intensive tasks. We present Reinforcement Learning from Self-Feedback (RLSF), a post-training stage that uses the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Carel van Niekerk , Renato Vukovic , Benjamin Matthias Ruppik , Hsien-chin Lin , Milica Gašić

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have emerged as a popular choice for training an efficient and effective dialogue policy. However, these methods suffer from sparse and unstable reward signals returned by a user simulator only when a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-18 Ziming Li , Sungjin Lee , Baolin Peng , Jinchao Li , Julia Kiseleva , Maarten de Rijke , Shahin Shayandeh , Jianfeng Gao

Learning to rank (LTR) plays a crucial role in various Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. Although supervised LTR methods based on fine-grained relevance labels (e.g., document-level annotations) have achieved significant success, their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Yiteng Tu , Zhichao Xu , Tao Yang , Weihang Su , Yujia Zhou , Yiqun Liu , Fen Lin , Qin Liu , Qingyao Ai