arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

Training Reasoning Models to Generate Diverse Scientific Ideas

The paper introduces a method for training large language models to generate diverse, high‑quality scientific ideas grounded in input documents. By using a set‑level reinforcement learning objective that rewards ideas for being distinct from earlier ones, the authors train an 8B model that outperforms Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT‑6 Astra on a contamination‑free benchmark. Human experts rate the model’s idea sets as equally promising while containing slightly more unique ideas, and automated experiments show comparable executability.

By Manya Wadhwa, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Hiroaki Hayashi, Yu Li, Tuhin Chakrabarty, Chien-Sheng Wu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Learning Generalizable Behaviors for Terminal Agents

The paper introduces the Agentic Compositional Generalization hypothesis, suggesting that reinforcement learning (RL) primarily refines high‑level decision‑making behaviors that orchestrate pre‑trained low‑level skills, rather than teaching new domain‑specific skills from scratch. It proposes River, a training recipe that enhances reward quality by filtering low‑quality synthetic environments and adding process‑level behavior regularization. Using River, RL‑trained agents outperform other open‑source 8B models on four terminal‑agent benchmarks, achieving significant gains with fewer than 30% of the training environments.

By Yihang Yao, Bo Pang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Ding Zhao, Shafiq Joty, Semih Yavuz
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 5

HARPO: Hallucination-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Faithful and Creative Language Generation

HARPO is a reinforcement learning framework that jointly optimizes faithfulness and creativity in language generation. It uses a Hallucination-Aware Generative Reward Model (HA‑GRM) to evaluate both faithfulness and writing quality, and a Selective Activation Mechanism (SAM) that applies writing rewards only to hallucination‑free outputs. Experiments on Qwen models show that HARPO improves faithfulness scores and reduces hallucination rates while boosting creative‑writing performance.

By Tiezheng Yu, Yuxin Jiang, Jinpeng Li, Shuning Sun, Fei Mi, Haoli Bai, Lifeng Shang
arXiv AI
Oct 16

EliteReplay: Preserving Diverse Solutions in RL Post-Training via Quality-Diversity Search

EliteReplay is a post‑training method that combines GRPO with a quality‑diversity archive to preserve diverse solutions in reinforcement learning. By collecting distinct strategies from a frozen base model before training and replaying them during training, the approach improves accuracy while maintaining a broader set of correct solutions. On text‑to‑SQL tasks, EliteReplay outperforms baselines, achieving higher pass@128 scores and up to 77% more distinct correct strategies, and it better handles ambiguous questions by covering multiple interpretations.

By Hanane Nour Moussa, Doeun Lee, Sachin Kumar