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Related papers: Value-Gradient Hypothesis of RL for LLMs

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We argue that decomposing reward into weighted, verifiable criteria and using an LLM judge to score them provides a partial-credit optimization signal: instead of a binary outcome or a single holistic score, each response is graded along…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Manish Bhattarai , Ismael Boureima , Nishath Rajiv Ranasinghe , Scott Pakin , Dan O'Malley

In this work, we introduce Reinforcement Pre-Training (RPT) as a new scaling paradigm for large language models and reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, we reframe next-token prediction as a reasoning task trained using RL, where it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Qingxiu Dong , Li Dong , Yao Tang , Tianzhu Ye , Yutao Sun , Zhifang Sui , Furu Wei

Large language model (LLM) agents learn by interacting with environments, but long-horizon training remains fundamentally bottlenecked by sparse and delayed rewards. Existing methods typically address this challenge through post-hoc credit…

In value-based reinforcement learning (RL), unlike in supervised learning, the agent faces not a single, stationary, approximation problem, but a sequence of value prediction problems. Each time the policy improves, the nature of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Will Dabney , André Barreto , Mark Rowland , Robert Dadashi , John Quan , Marc G. Bellemare , David Silver

AI alignment in the shape of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is increasingly treated as a crucial ingredient for high performance large language models. Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has been positioned by recent…

The application of reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) constitutes a rapidly advancing research area. While MLLMs extend Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Guanghao Zhou , Panjia Qiu , Cen Chen , Jie Wang , Zheming Yang , Jian Xu , Minghui Qiu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) with PPO-like clip objectives has become the standard choice for reward-based fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). Although recent work has explored improved estimators of advantages and normalization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Philipp Becker , Niklas Freymuth , Serge Thilges , Fabian Otto , Gerhard Neumann

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), with recent innovations such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) demonstrating exceptional…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Zhihe Yang , Xufang Luo , Zilong Wang , Dongqi Han , Zhiyuan He , Dongsheng Li , Yunjian Xu

Recently, GRPO-based reinforcement learning has shown remarkable progress in optimizing flow-matching models, effectively improving their alignment with task-specific rewards. Within these frameworks, the policy update relies on…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Jing Wang , Jiajun Liang , Jie Liu , Henglin Liu , Gongye Liu , Jun Zheng , Wanyuan Pang , Ao Ma , Zhenyu Xie , Xintao Wang , Meng Wang , Pengfei Wan , Xiaodan Liang

The role of reinforcement learning (RL) in enhancing the reasoning of large language models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly significant. Despite the success of RL in many scenarios, there are still many challenges in improving the reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Jiacai Liu , Chaojie Wang , Chris Yuhao Liu , Liang Zeng , Rui Yan , Yiwen Sun , Yang Liu , Yahui Zhou

Action-values play a central role in popular Reinforcement Learing (RL) models of behavior. Yet, the idea that action-values are explicitly represented has been extensively debated. Critics had therefore repeatedly suggested that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Lior Fox , Yonatan Loewenstein

Many capable large language models (LLMs) are developed via self-supervised pre-training followed by a reinforcement-learning fine-tuning phase, often based on human or AI feedback. During this stage, models may be guided by their inductive…

Recent months have seen the emergence of a powerful new trend in which large language models (LLMs) are augmented to become autonomous language agents capable of performing objective oriented multi-step tasks on their own, rather than…

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, extensive reasoning traces lead to inefficiencies and increased time-to-first-token (TTFT). We propose a training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Roy Xie , David Qiu , Deepak Gopinath , Dong Lin , Yanchao Sun , Chong Wang , Saloni Potdar , Bhuwan Dhingra

Large language models (LLMs) are reshaping the recommender system paradigm by enabling users to express preferences and receive recommendations through conversations. Yet, aligning LLMs to the recommendation task remains challenging:…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yaochen Zhu , Harald Steck , Dawen Liang , Yinhan He , Vito Ostuni , Jundong Li , Nathan Kallus

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities in complex problem-solving tasks, sparking growing interest in their application to preference reasoning in recommendation systems. Existing methods typically…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Yang Zhang , Wenxin Xu , Xiaoyan Zhao , Wenjie Wang , Fuli Feng , Xiangnan He , Tat-Seng Chua

Policy gradient methods rely on a baseline to measure the relative advantage of an action, ensuring the model reinforces behaviors that outperform its current average capability. In the training of Large Language Models (LLMs) using…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Yi-Kai Zhang , Zhiyuan Yao , Hongyan Hao , Yueqing Sun , Qi Gu , Hui Su , Xunliang Cai , De-Chuan Zhan , Han-Jia Ye

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) enhances Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning but suffers from advantage collapse on ``hard samples'' where all rollouts fail. This lack of variance eliminates crucial learning signals.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Xinyu Lu , Kaiqi Zhang , Jinglin Yang , Boxi Cao , Yaojie Lu , Hongyu Lin , Min He , Xianpei Han , Le Sun

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach to enhance task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. However, existing RL methods tend to mainly focus on generation tasks, such as dialogue policy learning (DPL) or response generation (RG),…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Huifang Du , Shuqin Li , Minghao Wu , Xuejing Feng , Yuan-Fang Li , Haofen Wang

Alignment is vital for safely deploying large language models (LLMs). Existing techniques are either reward-based (training a reward model on preference pairs and optimizing with reinforcement learning) or reward-free (directly fine-tuning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ruoxi Cheng , Haoxuan Ma , Weixin Wang , Ranjie Duan , Jiexi Liu , Xiaoshuang Jia , Simeng Qin , Xiaochun Cao , Yang Liu , Xiaojun Jia
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