Reinforcement learning

Policy optimisation, reward modelling and RLHF — how models are trained by feedback rather than by labels.

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arXiv AI
Jun 19

AAPA: Adversarially Anchored Preference Alignment for Post-Training of Large Language Models

arXiv:2509. 25148v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Post-training alignment of large language models often combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on expert demonstrations with reinforcement learning (RL) from preference or verifiable feedback.

By Faqiang Qian, Kang An, Weikun Zhang, Ziliang Wang, Xuhui Zheng, Liangjian Wen, Yong Dai, Mengya Gao, Yichao Wu
arXiv AI
Jun 19

MetaResearcher: Scaling Deep Research via Self-Reflective Reinforcement Learning in Adversarial Virtual Environments

arXiv:2606. 19893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in autonomous information gathering and synthesis, yet their training remains constrained by the static nature of simulated environments, the limits of fact-retrieval-only task designs, and the inefficiency of outcome-based reinforcement learning.

By Wei Yu, Suxing Liu, Minjie Yu, Jiahao Wang, Zhijian Zheng, Haocheng Deng, Bing Li
arXiv AI
Jun 19

PCBSchemaGen: Reward-Guided LLM Code Synthesis for Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) Schematic Design with Structured Verification

arXiv:2602. 00510v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most LLM code-synthesis benchmarks rely on unit tests as the reward oracle, but PCB schematic design has none: correctness is defined by structured physical constraints over real IC packages and pin-level assignments, per-task golden references are unavailable, and SPICE simulation does not validate schematic-level correctness.

By Huanghaohe Zou, Peng Han, Emad Nazerian, Mafu Zhang, Zhicheng Guo, Alex Q. Huang
arXiv AI
Jun 19

Reinforcement-aware Knowledge Distillation for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2602. 22495v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students.

By Zhaoyang Zhang, Shuli Jiang, Yantao Shen, Yuting Zhang, Dhananjay Ram, Shuo Yang, Zhuowen Tu, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 19

Stabilizing Bandits using Regularization: Precise Regret and A Quantitative Central Limit Theorem

arXiv:2603. 10184v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Statistical inference with bandit data presents fundamental challenges owing to adaptive sampling, which violates the independence assumptions underlying classical asymptotic theory.

By Budhaditya Halder, Ishan Sengupta, Koustav Chowdhury, Samya Praharaj, Koulik Khamaru
arXiv AI
Jun 19

Formal Verification of Learned Multi-Agent Communication Policies via Decision Tree Distillation

arXiv:2606. 19632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) enables agents to develop coordination strategies through emergent communication, but neural policies lack the formal safety guarantees required for safety-critical robotic deployment in drone swarms and autonomous vehicle fleets.

By Ahmad Farooq, Kamran Iqbal
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 18

Connect the Dots: Training LLMs for Long-Lifecycle Agents with Cross-Domain Generalization Via Reinforcement Learning

This work presents a general framework for training large language models (LLMs) to "Connect the Dots" (CoD), a meta-capability required by long-lifecycle agents: as an LLM-based AI agent gets deployed in an environment, it solves a long sequence of tasks while continuously exploring the environment, learning from its own experiences, and iteratively self-updating its context about the environment, thereby achieving progressively better performance on future tasks conditioned on the updated context. Major components of the CoD framework include: (1) algorithm design and infrastructure for end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) with long rollout sequences interleaving solve-task and update-context episodes; (2) tasks and environments for incentivizing and eliciting the targeted meta-capability in LLMs during training, as well as for faithfully measuring progress during evaluation.

arXiv AI
Jun 18

LLMZero: Discovering Adaptive Training Strategies for RL Post-Training via LLM Agents

arXiv:2606. 18388v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: RL post-training strategies are dataset-dependent and reveal a recurring empirical pattern: capacity parameters accumulate monotonically across stages, while regularization parameters predominantly oscillate in response to shifting training dynamics.

By Haoyang Fang, Wei Zhu, Boran Han, Alex Zhang, Zhenyu Pan, Shuo Yang, Shuai Zhang, Jiading Gai, Peng Tang, Cuixiong Hu, Xuan Zhu, Huzefa Rangwala, George Karypis, Bernie Wang