arXiv:2607. 16205v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has emerged as a standard approach for enhancing reasoning in large language models, which typically optimizes the policy by contrasting multiple self generated rollouts.
By Dayu Wang, Jiaye Yang, Weikang Li, Jiahui Liang, Liwei Qian, Xin Pei, Jizhou Huang
arXiv:2610.15840v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model (LLM) agents remains challenging in long-horizon tasks with sparse outcome rewards, where assign...
By Kaijie Zhu, Weixiang Yan, Omar Attia, Abbas Kazerouni, Alexander Toshev, Andrew Szot
arXiv:2510. 05592v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Outcome-driven reinforcement learning has advanced reasoning in large language models (LLMs), but prevailing tool-augmented approaches train a single, monolithic policy that interleaves thoughts and tool calls under full context; this scales poorly with long horizons and diverse tools and generalizes weakly to new scenarios.
By Zhuofeng Li, Haoxiang Zhang, Seungju Han, Sheng Liu, Jianwen Xie, Yu Zhang, Yejin Choi, James Zou, Pan Lu
AEM: Adaptive Entropy Modulation for Multi‑Turn Agentic Reinforcement Learning proposes a supervision‑free credit assignment technique that adjusts entropy dynamics at the response level during RL training. By aligning uncertainty estimation with the granularity of LLM agent actions and rescaling advantages based on a response‑level uncertainty proxy, AEM improves the exploration‑exploitation balance without relying on dense intermediate supervision. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and SWE‑bench‑Verified show consistent performance gains across models from 1.5B to 32B, including a 1.4% improvement in a state‑of‑the‑art software‑engineering RL framework.
By Haotian Zhao, Songlin Zhou, Yuxin Zhang, Stephen S. -T. Yau, Wenyu Zhang, Lun Tian, Tianshu Zhu, Yifeng Huang, Yucheng Zeng, Jingnan Gu, Daxiang Dong, Jianmin Wu
arXiv:2608.24696v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) and on-policy distillation (OPD) have become two widely adopted paradigms for post-training lar...
By Wenze Lin, Jiale Zhao, Xitai Jiang, Songde Rao, Yining Li, Shenzhi Wang, Bingxiang He, Gao Huang
arXiv:2609.37119v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Recent approaches to reinforcement learning (RL) post-training for large language models increasingly remove the critic to reduce training instabilit...
By Hongyang Li, Xiao Li, Caesar Wu, Said Mammar, Gr\'egoire Danoy, Pascal Bouvry
SIPO (Self‑Instructing Policy Optimization) unifies reinforcement learning with on‑policy self‑distillation by using a contrastive self‑teacher to generate token‑level credit signals. The method samples multiple rollouts per prompt, pairs each with a reference answer and its mistakes, and uses the difference in teacher log‑probabilities to provide dense feedback while still respecting the overall task reward. Experiments on reasoning and code‑generation benchmarks show that SIPO outperforms both RLVR and OPSD baselines without requiring an external teacher or extra generation steps.
By Zhenrui Yue, Huimin Zeng, Yueqi Wang, Yaokun Liu, Fengran Mo, Jinghan Zhang, Mung Yao Jia, Gyuseok Lee, Yang Zhang, Na Wei, Dong Wang
arXiv:2606. 01281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs).
By Yixiu Mao, Yun Qu, Qi Wang, Heming Zou, Xiangyang Ji
AgenticRag‑R1 is a reinforcement‑learning framework that integrates reasoning, retrieval, and memory through a stack and fine‑grained action space. It uses hierarchical action‑aware rewards and an information‑aware trajectory rejection strategy to support long‑horizon learning. Experiments on multi‑hop, open‑domain, and agentic reasoning benchmarks show that AgenticRag‑R1 outperforms strong baselines and produces robust, interpretable, memory‑aware reasoning behaviors.
By Xinke Jiang, Yue Fang, Zhibang Yang, Jiaran Gao, Zhixin Zhang, Tao Feng, Rihong Qiu, Wentao Zhang, Hongxin Ding, Ruizhe Zhang, Yongxin Xu, Yuheng Huang, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
Natural Language Actor-Critic (NLAC) is a new actor‑critic algorithm that trains large language model (LLM) agents by using a generative LLM critic to produce natural‑language feedback instead of scalar rewards. By providing richer, actionable explanations for suboptimal actions, NLAC helps LLM policies improve without relying on random exploration, and it can be trained off‑policy without policy gradients. Experiments on reasoning, web browsing, tool‑use, and dialogue tasks show that NLAC outperforms existing training methods and offers a more scalable and stable training paradigm for LLM agents.
By Joey Hong, Kang Liu, Zhan Ling, Jiecao Chen, Sergey Levine
The paper "Demystifying Reinforcement Learning Post-Training of Language Models" investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) post‑training enhances large language models (LLMs) for tasks such as reasoning, math, and coding. By isolating RL components in a controlled setting, the authors analyze how the base model’s prior distribution, reward granularity, prompt diversity, and model scale influence outcomes, using policy entropy to compare pre‑training, supervised fine‑tuning (SFT), and RL stages. The study clarifies the role of spurious rewards, the importance of the base model’s probability mass on desired behaviors, and how these factors interact to determine post‑training success, offering a practical primer for NLP researchers.
"whyItMatters":"The work provides a clearer understanding of RL post‑training mechanics, helping researchers and practitioners effectively apply RL to improve LLM capabilities."
By Donovan Clay, Saket Gollapudi, Sankar Harilal, Min Jang, Jacob Morrison, Sewoong Oh, Natasha Jaques
arXiv:2605. 20256v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning has become a cornerstone for aligning and unlocking the reasoning capabilities of large-scale models.
By Xikai Zhang, Yongzhi Li, Likang Xiao, Yingze Zhang, Yanhua Cheng, Quan Chen, Peng Jiang, Wenjun Wu, Liu Liu