arXiv Machine Learning

Spurious Rewards Paradox: Mechanistically Understanding How RLVR Activates Memorization Shortcuts in LLMs

arXiv:2601. 11061v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is highly effective for enhancing LLM reasoning, yet recent evidence shows models like Qwen 2.

arXiv AI

Jun 18

Sparsity Curse: Understanding RLVR Model Parameter Space from Model Merging

arXiv:2606. 18521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm that surpasses Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) in eliciting reasoning intelligence and resisting catastrophic forgetting.

By Chenrui Wu, Zexi Li, Jiajun Bu, Jiangchuan Liu, Haishuai Wang

reinforcement-learning fine-tuning efficiency benchmarks

arXiv Machine Learning

Jul 14

SCOPE-RL: Optimizing Reasoning Paths Before and After Success

arXiv:2607. 11506v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) optimizes LLMs using sparse verifiable final-answer rewards.

By Xiaojian Liu, Han Xu, Jianqiang Xia, Zhixuan Li, Ke Xu, Yiwei Dai, Xinran Chen, Changwo Wu, Yuchen Li

llms reinforcement-learning

arXiv AI

Jul 24

When RLVR Shrinks the Reasoning Boundary: Diagnosing Pass@k Inversion

arXiv:2607. 20543v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can improve one-sample accuracy while making a model worse under repeated sampling.

By Todd Zhou

agents reinforcement-learning multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jun 9

Mechanistic origins of catastrophic forgetting: why RL preserves circuits better than SFT?

arXiv:2605. 28860v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) frequently induces catastrophic forgetting of prior capabilities.

By Jeanmely Rojas Nunez, Viraj Sawant, Nathan Allen, Nomgondalai Amgalanbaatar, Yannis Zongo, Vasu Sharma, Maheep Chaudhary

llms reinforcement-learning fine-tuning

arXiv Machine Learning

Jul 22

H$^2$SD: Hybrid Hindsight Self-Distillation

arXiv:2607. 18955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models on tasks such as mathematical reasoning and code generation.

By Qiye Cai, Yichuan Ma, Linyang Li, Peiji Li, Yongkang Chen, Qipeng Guo, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Xiaocheng Feng, Bing Qin

llms reinforcement-learning efficiency benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jun 19

Beyond Reasoning Gains: Mitigating General-Capability Forgetting in Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2510. 21978v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has delivered impressive gains in mathematical and multimodal reasoning and has become a standard post-training paradigm for contemporary language and vision-language models.

By Hoang Phan, Xianjun Yang, Yuanshun Yao, Jingyu Zhang, Shengjie Bi, Xiaocheng Tang, Madian Khabsa, Lijuan Liu, Deren Lei

llms reinforcement-learning multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jun 18

Mechanism-Guided Selective Unlearning for RLVR-Induced Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 19222v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose MAST (Mechanism-Aligned Selective Targeting), a mechanism-guided method for unlearning RLVR-induced reasoning with substantially lower collateral damage than standard full-parameter updates.

By Chenyu Zhou, Qiliang Jiang, Shuning Wu, Xu Zhou

fine-tuning

arXiv AI

Aug 7

DASH: Divergence-Adaptive Supervision Horizons for On-Policy Self-Distillation of Reasoning Models

arXiv:2608. 06243v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models using automatically verifiable outcome signals, but these signals are typically sparse and at the sequence-level.

By ZhiYan Hou, Xinyu Tang, Hongyan An, Jianjin Zhang, Weizhen Wang, Yunyun Han, Gengsheng Li, Xiangzhao Hao, Haiyun Guo, Wenbin Hu, Jinqiao Wang, Yafeng Deng

llms reinforcement-learning efficiency benchmarks

arXiv Machine Learning

Jun 17

Continual Self-Improvement with Lightweight Experiential Latent Memories

arXiv:2606. 17803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models achieve strong reasoning performance by scaling inference-time compute, yet remain fundamentally stateless, discarding the rich, self-produced reasoning traces generated during this process.

By Vaggelis Dorovatas, Nancy Kalaj, Rahaf Aljundi

llms reinforcement-learning benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jul 28

From RLVR to RLSVR: Task Transformation Induces Self-Verifiable Rewards for Open-Ended LLM Self-Improvement

arXiv:2607. 23802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has driven recent progress in reasoning-oriented large language models (LLMs) by enabling large-scale optimization.

By Qinsi Wang, Jing Shi, Huazheng Wang, Kun Wan, Yiran Wu, Bo Liu, Qingyun Wu, Hai Helen Li, Yiran Chen, Handong Zhao, Wentian Zhao

llms agents nlp reinforcement-learning safety

arXiv AI

Jul 13

Prompt-Driven Exploration

arXiv:2607. 08837v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Exploration is essential to RL since a policy cannot improve by repeatedly sampling the behaviors it already prefers.

By Sunshine Jiang, John Marangola, David Zhang, Raghuram Kowdeed, Ruiyang Luo, Nitish Dashora, Richard Li, Pulkit Agrawal, Zhang-Wei Hong

llms reinforcement-learning robotics multimodal

arXiv Machine Learning

Jul 10

When Does Continual Learning Require Learning

arXiv:2607. 07847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, the next question is how can we enable models to continually learn?

By Anne Harrington, Nayan Saxena, Michael Murphy, Anastasia Borovykh, Zeyu Yun, Sridhar Kamath, Ara Eindra Kyi, Trevor Darrell, Jitendra Malik, Yutong Bai

llms agents reinforcement-learning fine-tuning efficiency benchmarks

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