Related papers: When LLM Reward Design Fails: Diagnostic-Driven Re…

Iterative self-correction is increasingly deployed in agentic LLM systems, yet whether repeated refinement improves or degrades performance remains inconsistent across models. We recast self-correction as a closed-loop feedback-control…

Reinforcement learning (RL) based on the final answer's reward has driven recent progress in small language models (SLMs) on reasoning-heavy tasks such as math and code. However, applying the same techniques to retrieval-augmented…

Recent works on large language models (LLMs) have successfully demonstrated the emergence of reasoning capabilities via reinforcement learning (RL). Although recent efforts leverage group relative policy optimization (GRPO) for MLLMs…

Using learned reward functions (LRFs) as a means to solve sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) tasks has yielded some steady progress in task-complexity through the years. In this work, we question whether today's LRFs are best-suited…

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on large quantities of high-quality annotated data, or questions with well-defined ground truth answers in the case of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). While…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been effective for post-training autoregressive (AR) language models, but extending these methods to diffusion language models (DLMs) is challenging due to intractable sequence-level likelihoods. Existing…

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is commonly used in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback to align large language models (LLMs) with downstream tasks. This paper investigates the feasibility of using PPO for direct reinforcement…

Data selection for finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) can be framed as a budget-constrained optimization problem: maximizing a model's downstream performance under a strict training data budget. Solving this problem is generally…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as evaluators, offering a scalable alternative to human annotation. However, existing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approaches often fall short in domains that demand complex reasoning.…

Large language models (LLMs) trained via pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can still produce harmful and misaligned outputs, or struggle in domains like math and coding. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods,…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been proven to be an effective and robust method for training neural machine translation systems, especially when paired with powerful reward models that accurately assess translation quality. However, most…

Recent advancements in code generation have shown remarkable success across software domains, yet hardware description languages (HDLs) such as Verilog remain underexplored due to their concurrency semantics, syntactic rigidity, and…

Evaluating Large Language Model (LLM) applications differs from traditional software testing because outputs are stochastic, high-dimensional, and sensitive to prompt and model changes. We present an evaluation-driven workflow - Define,…

Designing efficient reward functions for low-level control tasks is a challenging problem. Recent research aims to reduce reliance on expert experience by using Large Language Models (LLMs) with task information to generate dense reward…

Post-training for reasoning of large language models (LLMs) increasingly relies on verifiable rewards: deterministic checkers that provide 0-1 correctness signals. While reliable, such binary feedback is brittle--many tasks admit partially…

Prompt-only, single-step LLM query rewriting, where a rewrite is generated from the query alone without retrieval feedback, is commonly used in production RAG pipelines, but its effect on dense retrieval is poorly understood. We present a…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable creative writing capabilities, yet their substantial computational demands hinder widespread use. Enhancing Small Language Models (SLMs) offers a promising alternative, but current…

Reinforcement learning has become the standard for improving reasoning in large language models, yet evidence increasingly suggests that RL does not teach new strategies; it redistributes probability mass over solutions the base model…

Training reliable tool-augmented agents remains a significant challenge, largely due to the difficulty of credit assignment in multi-step reasoning. While process-level reward models offer a promising direction, existing LLM-based judges…

Instruction-driven image editing with unified multimodal generative models has advanced rapidly, yet their underlying visual reasoning remains limited, leading to suboptimal performance on reasoning-centric edits. Reinforcement learning…