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:2606. 04807v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mitigating social bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a distinct alignment challenge: unlike verifiable tasks, bias lacks a single ground truth, creating a high-variance, subjective reward landscape.
By Saket Reddy, Ke Yang, ChengXiang Zhai
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
arXiv:2603. 25184v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become essential for post-training large language models (LLMs) in reasoning tasks.
By Jiahao Wu, Ning Lu, Shengcai Liu, Kun Wang, Yanting Yang, Bailong Lin, Chen Jason Zhang, Li Qing, Ke Tang
Mitigating social bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a distinct alignment challenge: unlike verifiable tasks, bias lacks a single ground truth, creating a high-variance, subjective reward landscape. Previous preference-based fine-tuning methods have major trade-offs: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is limited by the lack of exploration inherent in offline training, while Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) can lead to training instability due to potentially unreliable critic estimates.
arXiv:2608. 05541v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evolution Strategy (ES) is a promising alternative to gradient-based fine-tuning for resource-constrained Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning.
By Yu Gu, Zhi Zheng, Yunpeng Ba, Xialiang Tong, Mingxuan Yuan, Zhenkun Wang
arXiv:2606. 02521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One-step text-to-image generators are attractive for deployment because they generate an image with a single forward pass, but preference finetuning them remains difficult: standard alignment methods often rely on policy likelihoods, denoising trajectories, differentiable reward gradients, or test-time optimization.
By Zhou Jiang, Yandong Wen, Zhen Liu
arXiv:2602. 21492v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training paradigm for large language models (LLMs), but its performance is highly sensitive to the quality of training problems.
By Ningyuan Yang, Weihua Du, Weiwei Sun, Sean Welleck, Yiming Yang
arXiv:2608. 16072v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) with group-relative advantages has become the de facto standard for post-training language model reasoners.
By Yixuan Wang, Yifei Chen, Haichao Zhang, Haozheng Luo, Xander Wu, Jie Ni, Yun Fu, Nuno Vasconcelos, Yijiang Li
arXiv:2606. 05025v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) suffer from shortcut learning: they systematically fail on out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs whose semantic surface differs from training data, even when the logical structure is identical.
By Zehua Cheng, Wei Dai, Jiahao Sun
arXiv:2508. 10123v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Advanced reasoning in LLMs on challenging domains like mathematical reasoning can be tackled using verifiable rewards based reinforced fine-tuning (ReFT).
By Maxime Heuillet, Yufei Cui, Boxing Chen, Audrey Durand, Prasanna Parthasarathi
arXiv:2606. 09635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ensuring the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) under distribution drift requires inference-time adaptation.
By Hankun Lin, Ruqi Zhang