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An impediment to using Large Language Models (LLMs) for reasoning output verification is that LLMs struggle to reliably identify errors in thinking traces, particularly in long outputs, domains requiring expert knowledge, and problems…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Kate Sanders , Nathaniel Weir , Sapana Chaudhary , Kaj Bostrom , Huzefa Rangwala

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance on complex reasoning tasks, with reinforcement learning under verifiable rewards (RLVR) emerging as a principled framework for aligning model behavior with reasoning chains.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Yunjian Zhang , Sudong Wang , Yang Li , Peiran Xu , Conghao Zhou , Xiaoyue Ma , Jianing Li , Yao Zhu

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate plausible code, but in settings that require exact stdin/stdout behavior they frequently produce programs that compile yet fail tests, and in some cases they introduce security-sensitive patterns.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Suryansh Singh Sijwali , Suman Saha

Effective reward design is a central challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for code generation. Mainstream test-suite-level outcome rewards enforce functional correctness but induce sparsity, while external Reward Models (RMs) provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Longwen Wang , Yirui Liu , Xuan'er Wu , Xiaohui Hu , Yuankai Fan , Kaidong Yu , Qizhen Weng , Wei Xi , Xuelong Li

Reinforcement Learning (RL) suffers from sample inefficiency in sparse reward domains, and the problem is further pronounced in case of stochastic transitions. To improve the sample efficiency, reward shaping is a well-studied approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Siddhant Bhambri , Amrita Bhattacharjee , Durgesh Kalwar , Lin Guan , Huan Liu , Subbarao Kambhampati

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to their increased application across various tasks, with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) being a crucial part of their training to align responses with user…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Ben Hauptvogel , Malte Ostendorff , Georg Rehm , Sebastian Möller

Prompting has shown impressive success in enabling large pretrained language models (LMs) to perform diverse NLP tasks, especially when only few downstream data are available. Automatically finding the optimal prompt for each task, however,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Mingkai Deng , Jianyu Wang , Cheng-Ping Hsieh , Yihan Wang , Han Guo , Tianmin Shu , Meng Song , Eric P. Xing , Zhiting Hu

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from pre-collected datasets, avoiding costly and risky online interactions, but it often struggles with long-horizon tasks involving sparse rewards. Existing goal-conditioned and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Chengyang Gu , Yuxin Pan , Hui Xiong , Yize Chen

Recent research leverages large language models (LLMs) for early mental health detection, such as depression, often optimized with machine-generated data. However, their detection may be subject to unknown weaknesses. Meanwhile, quality…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Zongru Shao , Xin Wang , Zhanyang Liu , Chenhan Wang , K. P. Subbalakshmi

Designing reward functions is a longstanding challenge in reinforcement learning (RL); it requires specialized knowledge or domain data, leading to high costs for development. To address this, we introduce Text2Reward, a data-free framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Tianbao Xie , Siheng Zhao , Chen Henry Wu , Yitao Liu , Qian Luo , Victor Zhong , Yanchao Yang , Tao Yu

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly capable of following instructions and complex reasoning, making prompting a flexible interface for adapting models without parameter updates. Yet prompt design remains labor-intensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Farima Fatahi Bayat , Moin Aminnaseri , Pouya Pezeshkpour , Estevam Hruschka

A promising approach for improving reasoning in large language models is to use process reward models (PRMs). PRMs provide feedback at each step of a multi-step reasoning trace, potentially improving credit assignment over outcome reward…

We present RM-RF, a lightweight reward model for run-free evaluation of automatically generated unit tests. Instead of repeatedly compiling and executing candidate tests, RM-RF predicts - from source and test code alone - three…

We deploy large language models (LLMs) as business development (BD) agents for persuasive price negotiation in online travel agencies (OTAs). The agent must follow a multi-stage Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and strict guardrails (no…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Xia Zeng , Yihan Chen , Luhui Liu , Chao Luo , Ye Chen , Zhuoran Zhuang

Achieving the effective design and improvement of reward functions in reinforcement learning (RL) tasks with complex custom environments and multiple requirements presents considerable challenges. In this paper, we propose ERFSL, an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Guanwen Xie , Jingzehua Xu , Yiyuan Yang , Yimian Ding , Shuai Zhang

Self-Rewarding Language Models propose an architecture in which the Large Language Models(LLMs) both generates responses and evaluates its own outputs via LLM-as-a-Judge prompting, dynamically improving its generative capabilities through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Yidong Wang , Xin Wang , Cunxiang Wang , Junfeng Fang , Qiufeng Wang , Jianing Chu , Xuran Meng , Shuxun Yang , Libo Qin , Yue Zhang , Wei Ye , Shikun Zhang

We propose FlowRL: matching the full reward distribution via flow balancing instead of maximizing rewards in large language model (LLM) reinforcement learning (RL). Recent advanced reasoning models adopt reward-maximizing methods (\eg, PPO…

Reinforcement learning (RL) trained language model agents with tool access are increasingly deployed in coding assistants, research tools, and autonomous systems. We introduce the Reward Hacking Benchmark (RHB), a suite of multi-step tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Kunvar Thaman

Reinforcement Learning (RL) in games has gained significant momentum in recent years, enabling the creation of different agent behaviors that can transform a player's gaming experience. However, deploying RL agents in production…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-01 António Afonso , Iolanda Leite , Alessandro Sestini , Florian Fuchs , Konrad Tollmar , Linus Gisslén

This study investigates the effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning techniques on a compact language model (Qwen2.5-0.5B Base) for two challenging tasks: instruction following and mathematical reasoning. We compare…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Yifu Han , Geo Zhang