Reinforcement learning

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

6,740 stories · RSS feed

arXiv AI
Sep 30

Learning from Viable Failure Prefixes: Milestone Viability Potential Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

The paper introduces Milestone Viability Potential Policy Optimization (MVPO), a reinforcement learning algorithm designed for long‑horizon large language model agents. MVPO addresses the zero‑credit failure problem by learning from viable failure prefixes, estimating prefix potential over Union‑Find viability regions, and repairing zero‑credit groups with potential‑difference advantages. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑1.5B‑Instruct demonstrate that MVPO outperforms eight strong baselines, improving success rates on ALFWorld and WebShop with minimal overhead.

By Qi Zhou, Yuanfan Li
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Learning to Prove, Not Just to Answer: Reinforcement Learning from Formal Verification for Natural-Language Logical Reasoning

The paper introduces Proof‑R1, a reinforcement‑learning framework that trains large language models to generate verifiable proofs for natural‑language logical reasoning tasks. Proof‑R1 only accepts a generated conclusion into the proof state when it satisfies formal verification constraints, ensuring each reasoning step is machine‑checkable. The method also reconstructs the dependency closure that supports the final answer, aligning credit with valid proof steps, and shows improved answer accuracy and verifiability across multiple benchmarks and models.

By Qili Zhang, Qianren Mao, Hanze Cai, Kaiming Zhao, Yuening He, Xihan Lei, Yashuo Luo, Hanwen Hao, Yutong Gu, Likang Xiao, Zhijun Chen, Weifeng Jiang, Haoyi Zhou, Jianxin Li
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Context Language Models

The paper introduces Context Language Models (CLMs), which treat context as a mutable file that the model can update freely, enabling the model to learn what information to retain. CLMs built zero‑shot from existing models outperform state‑of‑the‑art context‑management methods on several benchmarks, achieving higher accuracy with fewer FLOPs. The authors also demonstrate that CLMs can be steered via natural‑language instructions and online reinforcement learning, and they propose a suffix‑cache reuse strategy that further reduces server‑side compute.

By Rulin Shao, Shannon Zejiang Shen, Junjie Oscar Yin, Yuetai Li, Minheng Wang, Hamish Ivison, Radha Poovendran, Nathan Lambert, Teng Xiao, Mike Lewis, Wen-tau Yih, Luke Zettlemoyer, Pang Wei Koh
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Mutually Adversarial Self-Training with Evolving Data for Unified Multimodal Models

The paper introduces MATE, a reinforcement‑learning‑based post‑training framework for unified multimodal models that lets the generation and understanding branches challenge each other instead of cooperating. In MATE, each branch proposes candidate outputs that the other must reproduce, and the solver is trained on the worst‑handled candidate, creating an evolving adversarial loop without a separate adversary. Experiments on Janus‑Pro‑1B show that MATE improves generation and understanding metrics, including GenEval (+2.4), DPG‑Bench (+1.7), and an average of nine understanding benchmarks (+0.7), while enhancing consistency across image‑text cycles.

By Wentao Zhou, Weijie Gan, Jiayun Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Training LLMs to Verbalize Evaluation Awareness

The paper introduces Verbalization Training (VT), a technique that encourages large language models (LLMs) to openly express their evaluation awareness (EA) without directly supervising their internal beliefs. VT works by truncating model rollouts just before spontaneous verbalizations, creating training prefixes that signal awareness, and then applying a reinforcement learning objective to increase calibrated verbalization. Experiments on models such as Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, Kimi K2.6, and Inkling show that VT boosts verbalized EA by 2.4–2.9× while keeping latent EA and overall behavior largely unchanged, and a causal study confirms that VT-induced verbalizations reflect newly acquired meta‑knowledge.

By Usman Anwar, Sahar Abdelnabi, David Krueger
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Cooperative Multi-Agent Vision-Language-Action Models via Reinforced Fine Tuning

arXiv:2609.36588v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study reinforcement learning (RL) methods for cooperative multi-agent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. This problem is challenging because VLA...

By Ruixiao Xu, Wong Lik Hang Kenny, Zhiqian Liu, Jianing Guo, Hanxiao Li, Kejian Shi, Shuning Zhang, Pu Feng, Yongjia Ma, Yuqing Ma, Kai Chen, Qi Dou, Yaodong Yang, Xianglong Liu, Simin Li
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Video2STL: Grounding VLM-Generated Temporal Specifications for Robot Learning

arXiv:2609.37519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video-based policy learning is particularly promising, as it illustrates target behaviors without requiring action annotations or embodiment-matched...

By Merve Atasever, Keyan Azbijari, Cagan Bakirci, Bo-Ruei Huang, Tolga Izdas, Zahra Shahrooei, Richard Yang, Erdem Biyik, Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Challenges and Solutions for Bandits in the Wild: Warm-Started Mixture Bandits for Cross-Cohort Slate Recommendation

arXiv:2609.37800v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many recommender services repeatedly encounter cold-start cohorts, where new users arrive with little or no interaction history. This creates two cha...

By Serafima Lebedeva, Sumantrak Mukherjee, Ali Arshad Sadal, Ilias Ek\c{s}i, Rahul Sharma, Julia Mueller, Theresa Dombrowski, Jakob Karolus, Viktor Bengs, Eyke H\"ullermeier, Sebastian Vollmer
arXiv AI
Sep 30

CheatBench: Measuring Reward Gaming in AI Agents

arXiv:2609.36308v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning has helped AI agents solve increasingly difficult tasks, but high rewards do not always reflect the work users intended. In rece...

By Long Phan, Stephen K. Yang, Jason J. Lim, Mantas Mazeika, Wenyu Zhang, Zheyuan Liu, Richard Ren, Jingxiang Meng, Yaoteng Tan, Weiliang Zhao, Addison Wu, Matei Anghel, Dan Hendrycks