arXiv AI

A Technical Survey of Reinforcement Learning Techniques for Large Language Models

arXiv:2507. 04136v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This survey offers a comprehensive foundation on the integration of RL with language models, highlighting prominent algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), Q-Learning, and Actor-Critic methods.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 27

Performance Foundations of Parallel & Distributed Reasoning Language Models

The paper examines the computational challenges of training Reasoning Language Models (RLMs) using reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and similar post‑training methods. It provides a compute‑centric analysis of popular RL algorithms such as PPO and GRPO, and introduces a taxonomy of intra‑ and inter‑model parallelism strategies—including traditional and novel techniques—to improve scalability and cost‑efficiency. The authors also evaluate existing RLM frameworks and offer practical guidelines and research directions for building high‑performance, scalable RLMs.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

Performance Foundations of Parallel & Distributed Reasoning Language Models

The paper "Performance Foundations of Parallel & Distributed Reasoning Language Models" examines how reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and similar post‑training methods improve reasoning in large language models, yet demand massive computational resources. It provides a compute‑centric analysis of key RL frameworks such as PPO and GRPO, and introduces a taxonomy of intra‑ and inter‑model parallelism strategies—including data, tensor, pipeline, sequence, context, expert, disaggregated placement, stage fusion, hybrid parallelism, and asynchronous execution—to address the parallel and distributed systems challenges of training reasoning language models. The authors also analyze existing RLM frameworks, offering practical guidelines and outlining open research directions for building scalable, fast, and cost‑effective RLMs.

By Maciej Besta, Leonard Schmidt, Lara Nonino, Robert Gerstenberger, Pierre Pang, Patrik Okanovic, Ales Kubicek, Tiancheng Chen, Baraq Lipshitz, Torsten Hoefler
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

Gradients Know What Outcomes Don't: Unlocking Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning with Gradient-Aligned Rewards

The paper introduces Gradient-Aligned Reward (GAR), a reinforcement learning technique that uses truncated backpropagation to generate a compact gradient vector for each rollout and compares it to an expert-anchor gradient via cosine similarity. This dense, reasoning-aware reward improves large language model chain-of-thought reasoning on math benchmarks and transfers to other tasks without domain‑specific data, while adding less than 9% computational overhead. GAR outperforms existing baselines such as GRPO on Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B models.

By Leqi Zheng, Jinbo Su, Fang Niu, Chaokun Wang, Weiping Wang, Jiajun Zhang, Shannan Yan, Jie Wu, Zhaolu Kang, Rong Fu, Hang Zhang