arXiv Machine Learning

R2IF: Aligning Reasoning with Decisions via Composite Rewards for Interpretable LLM Function Calling

arXiv:2604. 20316v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Function calling empowers large language models (LLMs) to interface with external tools, yet existing RL-based approaches suffer from misalignment between reasoning processes and tool-call decisions.

arXiv AI
Jun 30

To Reason or to Fabricate: Reasoning Without Shortcuts via Hint-Anchored Pairwise Aggregation

arXiv:2606. 29481v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While reinforcement learning (RL) significantly enhances LLM reasoning, its efficacy is severely undermined by Pre-RL data overlap, where RL datasets overlap with pretraining or SFT corpora, causing models to exploit shortcuts by memorizing correct answers and fabricating post-hoc reasoning.

By Jiuheng Lin, Chen Zhang, Yansong Feng
arXiv AI
Jul 28

Loong: Synthesize Long Chain-of-Thoughts at Scale through Verifiers

arXiv:2509. 03059v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown that their reasoning capabilities can be significantly improved through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR), particularly in domains like mathematics and programming, where ground-truth correctness can be automatically evaluated.

By Xingyue Huang, Rishabh, Gregor Franke, Ziyi Yang, Jiamu Bai, Weijie Bai, Jinhe Bi, Zifeng Ding, Yiqun Duan, Chengyu Fan, Wendong Fan, Xin Gao, Ruohao Guo, Yuan He, Zhuangzhuang He, Xianglong Hu, Neil Johnson, Bowen Li, Fangru Lin, Siyu Lin, Tong Liu, Yunpu Ma, Hao Shen, Hao Sun, Beibei Wang, Fangyijie Wang, Hao Wang, Haoran Wang, Yang Wang, Yifeng Wang, Zhaowei Wang, Ziyang Wang, Yifan Wu, Zikai Xiao, Chengxing Xie, Fan Yang, Junxiao Yang, Qianshuo Ye, Ziyu Ye, Guangtao Zeng, Yuwen Ebony Zhang, Zeyu Zhang, Zihao Zhu, Bernard Ghanem, Philip Torr, Guohao Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 3

Right Makes Might: Aligning Verified Hidden States Empowers RL Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 03234v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become the dominant approach for improving mathematical reasoning in large language models, yet current methods reduce each correct rollout to a single reward bit, ignoring the geometric structure shared among their hidden states.

By Ziyue Wang, Aomufei Yuan, Yongfu Zhu, Shuai Dong, Wenpu Liu, Yiran Yao, Weichu Xie, Yuqi Xu, Caoyuan Ma, Wenqi Shao, Xiaoying Zhang, Nan Duan, Jiaqi Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Beyond Output Correctness: Benchmarking and Evaluating Large Language Model Reasoning in Coding Tasks

The paper introduces CodeRQ-Bench, the first benchmark for assessing large language model reasoning quality across coding tasks such as generation, summarization, and classification. It analyzes over a thousand mismatches from existing evaluators, identifies recurring limitations, and derives design insights that lead to a new two‑stage evaluator, VERA. Experiments show VERA outperforms strong baselines, improving AUCROC by up to 0.26 and AUPRC by up to 0.21 on four datasets.

By Yuangang Li, Justin Tian Jin Chen, Ethan Yu, David Hong, Iftekhar Ahmed
arXiv Machine Learning
3d ago

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Enhancing LLM Metacognition via Cognitive Pairwise Training

arXiv:2606. 00869v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become central to LLM reasoning, but its outcome-level rewards can make models more willing to give confident answers when evidence or reasoning is unreliable.

By Weitao Li, Hao Zhou, Xuanyu Lei, Fandong Meng, Yuanhang Liu, Jingyi Ren, Ante Wang, Xiaolong Wang, Yuanchi Zhang, Fuwen Luo, Guangwen Yang, Lin Gan, Weizhi Ma, Yang Liu