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While reinforcement learning (RL) demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of language models, the training dynamics of RL in LLMs remain unclear. In this work, we provide an explanation of the RL training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xingwu Chen , Tianle Li , Difan Zou

Reward hacking is a form of misalignment in which models overoptimize proxy rewards without genuinely solving the underlying task. Precisely measuring reward hacking occurrence remains challenging because true task rewards are often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Muhammad Khalifa , Zohaib Khan , Omer Tafveez , Hao Peng , Lu Wang

Language model (LM) post-training relies on two stages of human supervision: task demonstrations for supervised finetuning (SFT), followed by preference comparisons for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). As LMs become more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Yaowen Ye , Cassidy Laidlaw , Jacob Steinhardt

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Typical RL methods optimize under an overall sequence reward, which can lead to a suboptimal learning process. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Yanshi Li , Shaopan Xiong , Gengru Chen , Xiaoyang Li , Yijia Luo , Xingyuan Bu , Yingshui Tan , Wenbo Su , Bo Zheng

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful framework for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, most existing RL approaches rely on sparse outcome rewards, which fail to credit correct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Haolin Liu , Dian Yu , Sidi Lu , Yujun Zhou , Rui Liu , Zhenwen Liang , Haitao Mi , Chen-Yu Wei , Dong Yu

Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles with reward misalignment, where agents optimize given rewards but fail to exhibit the desired behaviors. This arises when the reward function incentivizes proxy behaviors misaligned with the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Mohammad Saif Nazir , Chayan Banerjee

Large language models have driven major advances in Text-to-SQL generation. However, they suffer from high computational cost, long latency, and data privacy concerns, which make them impractical for many real-world applications. A natural…

To convey desired behavior to a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, a designer must choose a reward function for the environment, arguably the most important knob designers have in interacting with RL agents. Although many reward functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Henry Sowerby , Zhiyuan Zhou , Michael L. Littman

Large language models pick up social biases from the data they are trained on and carry those biases into downstream applications, often reinforcing stereotypes around gender, race, religion, disability, age, and socioeconomic status. The…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Muneeb Ur Raheem Khan

Pre-trained large-scale language models (LLMs) excel at producing coherent articles, yet their outputs may be untruthful, toxic, or fail to align with user expectations. Current approaches focus on using reinforcement learning with human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Dehong Xu , Liang Qiu , Minseok Kim , Faisal Ladhak , Jaeyoung Do

Reinforcement learning (RL) from unit-test feedback has become a standard post-training recipe for improving large language models (LLMs) on code generation. However, the pass-all-tests binary reward can be sparse, yielding no learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Xin-Ye Li , Ren-Biao Liu , Yun-Ji Zhang , Hui Sun , Zheng Xie , Ming Li

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as "agents" for decision-making (DM) in interactive and dynamic environments. Yet, since they were not originally designed for DM, recent studies show that LLMs can struggle even in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Chanwoo Park , Ziyang Chen , Asuman Ozdaglar , Kaiqing Zhang

Most reward models for visual generation reduce rich human judgments to a single unexplained score, discarding the reasoning that underlies preference. We show that teaching reward models to produce explicit, multi-dimensional critiques…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Haozhe Wang , Cong Wei , Weiming Ren , Jiaming Liu , Fangzhen Lin , Wenhu Chen

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trusted as automated judges, assisting evaluation and providing reward signals for training other models, particularly in reference-based settings like Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yulai Zhao , Haolin Liu , Dian Yu , Sunyuan Kung , Meijia Chen , Haitao Mi , Dong Yu

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) connects large language models (LLMs) to external knowledge, but single-round retrieval is often insufficient for complex multi-hop questions. To enhance search capabilities for complex tasks, most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Kun Chen , Qingchao Kong , Zhao Feifei , Wenji Mao

The inherent uncertainty in the environmental transition model of Reinforcement Learning (RL) necessitates a delicate balance between exploration and exploitation. This balance is crucial for optimizing computational resources to accurately…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Yongxin Deng , Xihe Qiu , Jue Chen , Xiaoyu Tan

Due to their architecture and vast pre-training data, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong text classification performance. However, LLM output - here, the category assigned to a text - depends heavily on the wording of the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Kylie L. Anglin , Stephanie Milan , Brittney Hernandez , Claudia Ventura

Reward-based alignment methods for large language models (LLMs) face two key limitations: vulnerability to reward hacking, where models exploit flaws in the reward signal; and reliance on brittle, labor-intensive prompt engineering when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Zae Myung Kim , Chanwoo Park , Vipul Raheja , Suin Kim , Dongyeop Kang

Reward models (RMs) are critical components of alignment pipelines, yet they exhibit biases toward superficial stylistic cues, preferring better-presented responses over semantically superior ones. Existing debiasing methods typically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Mengyuan Sun , Zhuohao Yu , Weizheng Gu , Shikun Zhang , Wei Ye

The paradigm of scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) in both parameter size and test time has pushed the boundaries of AI capabilities, but at the cost of making the traditional generative evaluation paradigm prohibitively expensive,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Zhichen Liu , Tianle Lun , Zhibin Wen , Hao An , Yulin Ou , Jianhui Xu , Hao Zhang , Wenyi Fang , Yang Zheng , Yang Xu
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