English
Related papers

Related papers: How's it going? Reinforcement learning in language…

200 papers

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…

Large language models (LLMs) excel at logical and algorithmic reasoning, yet their emotional intelligence (EQ) still lags far behind their cognitive prowess. While reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has advanced in other…

In recent years, the successor representation (SR) has attracted increasing attention in reinforcement learning (RL), and it has been used to address some of its key challenges, such as exploration, credit assignment, and generalization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Hon Tik Tse , Siddarth Chandrasekar , Marlos C. Machado

In this work, we investigate how to leverage pre-trained visual-language models (VLM) for online Reinforcement Learning (RL). In particular, we focus on sparse reward tasks with pre-defined textual task descriptions. We first identify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Yuwei Fu , Haichao Zhang , Di Wu , Wei Xu , Benoit Boulet

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

A significant challenge for the practical application of reinforcement learning in the real world is the need to specify an oracle reward function that correctly defines a task. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to avoid this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-16 Kelvin Xu , Ellis Ratner , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves reasoning in large language models but treats all correct solutions equally, potentially reinforcing flawed traces that get correct answers by chance. We observe that better…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Tiehua Mei , Minxuan Lv , Leiyu Pan , Zhenpeng Su , Hongru Hou , Hengrui Chen , Ao Xu , Deqing Yang

Mapping natural language instructions to programs that computers can process is a fundamental challenge. Existing approaches focus on likelihood-based training or using reinforcement learning to fine-tune models based on a single reward. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-05 Sayan Ghosh , Shashank Srivastava

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been a main driver of recent breakthroughs in large reasoning models. Yet it remains a mystery how rewards based solely on final outcomes can help overcome the long-horizon barrier…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Yu Huang , Zixin Wen , Yuejie Chi , Yuting Wei , Aarti Singh , Yingbin Liang , Yuxin Chen

Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to expand the capabilities of language models, but it is unclear if current RL techniques promote the discovery of novel behaviors, or simply sharpen those already present in the base model. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Jens Tuyls , Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Jordan T. Ash

Exposure bias describes the phenomenon that a language model trained under the teacher forcing schema may perform poorly at the inference stage when its predictions are conditioned on its previous predictions unseen from the training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Yifan Xu , Kening Zhang , Haoyu Dong , Yuezhou Sun , Wenlong Zhao , Zhuowen Tu

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard approach for post-training large language models and, more recently, for improving image generation models, which uses reward functions to enhance generation quality and human preference…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Yunqi Hong , Kuei-Chun Kao , Hengguang Zhou , Cho-Jui Hsieh

We study a class of reinforcement learning problems where the reward signals for policy learning are generated by an internal reward model that is dependent on and jointly optimized with the policy. This interdependence between the policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Mengdi Li , Xufeng Zhao , Jae Hee Lee , Cornelius Weber , Stefan Wermter

Generative models have made significant progress in synthesizing visual content, including images, videos, and 3D/4D structures. However, they are typically trained with surrogate objectives such as likelihood or reconstruction loss, which…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Yuanzhi Liang , Yijie Fang , Ke Hao , Rui Li , Ziqi Ni , Ruijie Su , Chi Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown impressive results in sequential decision-making tasks. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged, exhibiting impressive capabilities in multimodal…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated strong potential in training large language models (LLMs) capable of complex reasoning for real-world problem solving. More recently, RL has been leveraged to create sophisticated LLM-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Bowen Jin , Jinsung Yoon , Priyanka Kargupta , Sercan O. Arik , Jiawei Han

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-24 Ademi Adeniji , Amber Xie , Carmelo Sferrazza , Younggyo Seo , Stephen James , Pieter Abbeel

The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critically dependent on reward models trained on costly human preference data. While recent work explores bypassing this cost with AI feedback, these methods often lack a rigorous theoretical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Yi-Chen Li , Tian Xu , Yang Yu , Xuqin Zhang , Xiong-Hui Chen , Zhongxiang Ling , Ningjing Chao , Lei Yuan , Zhi-Hua Zhou

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is widely used to improve reasoning in multiple domains, yet outcome-only scalar rewards are often sparse and uninformative, especially on failed samples, where they merely indicate…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Xuancheng Li , Haitao Li , Yujia Zhou , YiqunLiu , Qingyao Ai