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Feb 9

Training LLMs to Better Self-Debug and Explain Code

In the domain of code generation, self-debugging is crucial. It allows LLMs to refine their generated code based on execution feedback. This is particularly important because generating correct solutions in one attempt proves challenging for complex tasks. Prior works on self-debugging mostly focus on prompting methods by providing LLMs with few-shot examples, which work poorly on small open-sourced LLMs. In this work, we propose a training framework that significantly improves self-debugging capability of LLMs. Intuitively, we observe that a chain of explanations on the wrong code followed by code refinement helps LLMs better analyze the wrong code and do refinement. We thus propose an automated pipeline to collect a high-quality dataset for code explanation and refinement by generating a number of explanations and refinement trajectories and filtering via execution verification. We perform supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and further reinforcement learning (RL) on both success and failure trajectories with a novel reward design considering code explanation and refinement quality. SFT improves the pass@1 by up to 15.92% and pass@10 by 9.30% over four benchmarks. RL training brings additional up to 3.54% improvement on pass@1 and 2.55% improvement on pass@10. The trained LLMs show iterative refinement ability, and can keep refining code continuously. Lastly, our human evaluation shows that the LLMs trained with our framework generate more useful code explanations and help developers better understand bugs in source code.

  • 9 authors
·
May 28, 2024

Repair-R1: Better Test Before Repair

APR (Automated Program Repair) aims to automatically locate program defects, generate patches and validate the repairs. Existing techniques for APR are often combined with LLMs (Large Language Models), which leverages the code-related knowledge of LLMs to improve repair effectiveness. Current LLM-based APR methods typically utilize test cases only during the inference stage, adopting an iterative approach that performs repair first and validates it through test execution afterward. This conventional paradigm neglects two important aspects: the potential contribution of test cases in the training phase, and the possibility of leveraging testing prior to repair. To address this, we propose Repair-R1, which introduces test cases into the model's training phase and shifts test generation to precede repair. The model is required to first generate discriminative test cases that can distinguish defective behaviors, and then perform repair based on these tests. This enables the model to better locate defects and understand the underlying causes of defects, thereby improving repair effectiveness. We implement Repair-R1 with three different backbone models, using RL (reinforcement learning) to co-optimize test generation and bug repair. Experimental results on four widely adopted benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of Repair-R1. Specially, compared to vanilla models, Repair-R1 improves repair success rate by 2.68\% to 48.29\%, test generation success rate by 16.38\% to 53.28\%, and test coverage by 0.78\% to 53.96\%. We publish the code and weights at https://github.com/Tomsawyerhu/APR-RL and https://huggingface.co/tomhu/Qwen3-4B-RL-5000-step.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 30, 2025 2

Lyra: Orchestrating Dual Correction in Automated Theorem Proving

Large Language Models (LLMs) present an intriguing avenue for exploration in the field of formal theorem proving. Nevertheless, their full potential, particularly concerning the mitigation of hallucinations and refinement through prover error messages, remains an area that has yet to be thoroughly investigated. To enhance the effectiveness of LLMs in the field, we introduce the Lyra, a new framework that employs two distinct correction mechanisms: Tool Correction (TC) and Conjecture Correction (CC). To implement Tool Correction in the post-processing of formal proofs, we leverage prior knowledge to utilize predefined prover tools (e.g., Sledgehammer) for guiding the replacement of incorrect tools. Tool Correction significantly contributes to mitigating hallucinations, thereby improving the overall accuracy of the proof. In addition, we introduce Conjecture Correction, an error feedback mechanism designed to interact with prover to refine formal proof conjectures with prover error messages. Compared to the previous refinement framework, the proposed Conjecture Correction refines generation with instruction but does not collect paired (generation, error & refinement) prompts. Our method has achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both miniF2F validation (48.0% -> 55.3%) and test (45.5% -> 51.2%). We also present 3 IMO problems solved by Lyra. We believe Tool Correction (post-process for hallucination mitigation) and Conjecture Correction (subgoal adjustment from interaction with environment) could provide a promising avenue for future research in this field.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 27, 2023

Good SFT Optimizes for SFT, Better SFT Prepares for Reinforcement Learning

Post-training of reasoning LLMs is a holistic process that typically consists of an offline SFT stage followed by an online reinforcement learning (RL) stage. However, SFT is often optimized in isolation to maximize SFT performance alone. We show that, after identical RL training, models initialized from stronger SFT checkpoints can significantly underperform those initialized from weaker ones. We attribute this to a mismatch typical in current SFT-RL pipelines: the distribution that generates the offline SFT data can differ substantially from the policy optimized during online RL, which learns from its own rollouts. We propose PEAR (Policy Evaluation-inspired Algorithm for Offline Learning Loss Re-weighting), an SFT-stage method that corrects this mismatch and better prepares the model for RL. PEAR uses importance sampling to reweight the SFT loss, with three variants operating at the token, block, and sequence levels. It can be used to augment standard SFT objectives and incurs little additional training overhead once probabilities for the offline data are collected. We conduct controlled experiments on verifiable reasoning games and mathematical reasoning tasks on Qwen 2.5 and 3 and DeepSeek-distilled models. PEAR consistently improves post-RL performance over canonical SFT, with pass at 8 gains up to a 14.6 percent on AIME2025. Our results suggest that PEAR is an effective step toward more holistic LLM post-training by designing and evaluating SFT with downstream RL in mind rather than in isolation.

Step-wise Adaptive Integration of Supervised Fine-tuning and Reinforcement Learning for Task-Specific LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) excel at mathematical reasoning and logical problem-solving. The current popular training paradigms primarily use supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the models' reasoning abilities. However, when using SFT or RL alone, there are respective challenges: SFT may suffer from overfitting, while RL is prone to mode collapse. The state-of-the-art methods have proposed hybrid training schemes. However, static switching faces challenges such as poor generalization across different tasks and high dependence on data quality. In response to these challenges, inspired by the curriculum learning-quiz mechanism in human reasoning cultivation, We propose SASR, a step-wise adaptive hybrid training framework that theoretically unifies SFT and RL and dynamically balances the two throughout optimization. SASR uses SFT for initial warm-up to establish basic reasoning skills, and then uses an adaptive dynamic adjustment algorithm based on gradient norm and divergence relative to the original distribution to seamlessly integrate SFT with the online RL method GRPO. By monitoring the training status of LLMs and adjusting the training process in sequence, SASR ensures a smooth transition between training schemes, maintaining core reasoning abilities while exploring different paths. Experimental results demonstrate that SASR outperforms SFT, RL, and static hybrid training methods.

  • 10 authors
·
May 19, 2025

Neural Theorem Proving: Generating and Structuring Proofs for Formal Verification

Formally verifying properties of software code has been a highly desirable task, especially with the emergence of LLM-generated code. In the same vein, they provide an interesting avenue for the exploration of formal verification and mechanistic interpretability. Since the introduction of code-specific models, despite their successes in generating code in Lean4 and Isabelle, the task of generalized theorem proving still remains far from being fully solved and will be a benchmark for reasoning capability in LLMs. In this work, we introduce a framework that generates whole proofs in a formal language to be used within systems that utilize the power of built-in tactics and off-the-shelf automated theorem provers. Our framework includes 3 components: generating natural language statements of the code to be verified, an LLM that generates formal proofs for the given statement, and a module employing heuristics for building the final proof. To train the LLM, we employ a 2-stage fine-tuning process, where we first use SFT-based training to enable the model to generate syntactically correct Isabelle code and then RL-based training that encourages the model to generate proofs verified by a theorem prover. We validate our framework using the miniF2F-test benchmark and the Isabelle proof assistant and design a use case to verify the correctness of the AWS S3 bucket access policy code. We also curate a dataset based on the FVEL\textnormal{ER} dataset for future training tasks.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 23, 2025

ReFT: Reasoning with Reinforced Fine-Tuning

One way to enhance the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is to conduct Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotations. This approach does not show sufficiently strong generalization ability, however, because the training only relies on the given CoT data. In math problem-solving, for example, there is usually only one annotated reasoning path for each question in the training data. Intuitively, it would be better for the algorithm to learn from multiple annotated reasoning paths given a question. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective approach called Reinforced Fine-Tuning (ReFT) to enhance the generalizability of learning LLMs for reasoning, with math problem-solving as an example. ReFT first warmups the model with SFT, and then employs on-line reinforcement learning, specifically the PPO algorithm in this paper, to further fine-tune the model, where an abundance of reasoning paths are automatically sampled given the question and the rewards are naturally derived from the ground-truth answers. Extensive experiments on GSM8K, MathQA, and SVAMP datasets show that ReFT significantly outperforms SFT, and the performance can be potentially further boosted by combining inference-time strategies such as majority voting and re-ranking. Note that ReFT obtains the improvement by learning from the same training questions as SFT, without relying on extra or augmented training questions. This indicates a superior generalization ability for ReFT.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 16, 2024 2

OpenVLThinker: An Early Exploration to Complex Vision-Language Reasoning via Iterative Self-Improvement

Recent advancements demonstrated by DeepSeek-R1 have shown that complex reasoning abilities in large language models (LLMs), including sophisticated behaviors such as self-verification and self-correction, can be achieved by RL with verifiable rewards and significantly improves model performance on challenging tasks such as AIME. Motivated by these findings, our study investigates whether similar reasoning capabilities can be successfully integrated into large vision-language models (LVLMs) and assesses their impact on challenging multimodal reasoning tasks. We consider an approach that iteratively leverages supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on lightweight training data and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to further improve model generalization. Initially, reasoning capabilities were distilled from pure-text R1 models by generating reasoning steps using high-quality captions of the images sourced from diverse visual datasets. Subsequently, iterative RL training further enhance reasoning skills, with each iteration's RL-improved model generating refined SFT datasets for the next round. This iterative process yielded OpenVLThinker, a LVLM exhibiting consistently improved reasoning performance on challenging benchmarks such as MathVista, MathVerse, and MathVision, demonstrating the potential of our strategy for robust vision-language reasoning. The code, model and data are held at https://github.com/yihedeng9/OpenVLThinker.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 21, 2025 2

Intuitive Fine-Tuning: Towards Unifying SFT and RLHF into a Single Process

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) are two fundamental processes for enhancing the capabilities of Language Models (LMs) post pre-training, aligning them better with human preferences. Although SFT advances in training efficiency, RLHF delivers better alignment, thus they are often combined. However, common practices simply apply them sequentially without unifying their optimization targets, resulting in a trade-off between fitting different objectives, and ignoring the opportunities to bridge the paradigm gap and take the strength from both. To obtain a unified understanding, we interpret SFT and RLHF using two sub-processes -- Preference Estimation and Transition Optimization -- defined at token level within the Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework. This modeling shows that SFT is only a specialized case of RLHF with inferior estimation and optimization. RLHF evaluates the quality of model's entire generated answer, whereas SFT only scores predicted tokens based on preceding tokens from target answers. Therefore, SFT overestimates the ability of model, leading to inferior optimization. Building on this view, we introduce Intuitive Fine-tuning (IFT) to integrate SFT and RLHF into a single process. IFT captures LMs' intuitive sense of the entire answers through a temporal residual connection, while using a single policy and the same volume of non-preference-labeled data as SFT. Our experiments show that IFT performs comparably or even superiorly to sequential recipes of SFT and some typical alignment methods across several tasks, particularly those requires generation, reasoning, and fact-following abilities. An explainable Frozen Lake game further validates the effectiveness of IFT.

  • 8 authors
·
May 20, 2024

CYCLE: Learning to Self-Refine the Code Generation

Pre-trained code language models have achieved promising performance in code generation and improved the programming efficiency of human developers. However, their self-refinement capability is typically overlooked by the existing evaluations of code LMs, which focus only on the accuracy of the one-time prediction. For the cases when code LMs fail to implement the correct program, developers actually find it hard to debug and fix the faulty prediction since it is not written by the developers themselves. Unfortunately, our study reveals that code LMs cannot efficiently self-refine their faulty generations as well. In this paper, we propose CYCLE framework, learning to self-refine the faulty generation according to the available feedback, such as the execution results reported by the test suites. We evaluate CYCLE on three popular code generation benchmarks, HumanEval, MBPP, and APPS. The results reveal that CYCLE successfully maintains, sometimes improves, the quality of one-time code generation, while significantly improving the self-refinement capability of code LMs. We implement four variants of CYCLE with varied numbers of parameters across 350M, 1B, 2B, and 3B, and the experiments show that CYCLE consistently boosts the code generation performance, by up to 63.5%, across benchmarks and varied model sizes. We also notice that CYCLE outperforms code LMs that have 3times more parameters in self-refinement.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 27, 2024

LoopTool: Closing the Data-Training Loop for Robust LLM Tool Calls

Augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools enables them to execute complex, multi-step tasks. However, tool learning is hampered by the static synthetic data pipelines where data generation and model training are executed as two separate, non-interactive processes. This approach fails to adaptively focus on a model's specific weaknesses and allows noisy labels to persist, degrading training efficiency. We introduce LoopTool, a fully automated, model-aware data evolution framework that closes this loop by tightly integrating data synthesis and model training. LoopTool iteratively refines both the data and the model through three synergistic modules: (1) Greedy Capability Probing (GCP) diagnoses the model's mastered and failed capabilities; (2) Judgement-Guided Label Verification (JGLV) uses an open-source judge model to find and correct annotation errors, progressively purifying the dataset; and (3) Error-Driven Data Expansion (EDDE) generates new, challenging samples based on identified failures. This closed-loop process operates within a cost-effective, open-source ecosystem, eliminating dependence on expensive closed-source APIs. Experiments show that our 8B model trained with LoopTool significantly surpasses its 32B data generator and achieves new state-of-the-art results on the BFCL-v3 and ACEBench benchmarks for its scale. Our work demonstrates that closed-loop, self-refining data pipelines can dramatically enhance the tool-use capabilities of LLMs.

100 Days After DeepSeek-R1: A Survey on Replication Studies and More Directions for Reasoning Language Models

The recent development of reasoning language models (RLMs) represents a novel evolution in large language models. In particular, the recent release of DeepSeek-R1 has generated widespread social impact and sparked enthusiasm in the research community for exploring the explicit reasoning paradigm of language models. However, the implementation details of the released models have not been fully open-sourced by DeepSeek, including DeepSeek-R1-Zero, DeepSeek-R1, and the distilled small models. As a result, many replication studies have emerged aiming to reproduce the strong performance achieved by DeepSeek-R1, reaching comparable performance through similar training procedures and fully open-source data resources. These works have investigated feasible strategies for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR), focusing on data preparation and method design, yielding various valuable insights. In this report, we provide a summary of recent replication studies to inspire future research. We primarily focus on SFT and RLVR as two main directions, introducing the details for data construction, method design and training procedure of current replication studies. Moreover, we conclude key findings from the implementation details and experimental results reported by these studies, anticipating to inspire future research. We also discuss additional techniques of enhancing RLMs, highlighting the potential of expanding the application scope of these models, and discussing the challenges in development. By this survey, we aim to help researchers and developers of RLMs stay updated with the latest advancements, and seek to inspire new ideas to further enhance RLMs.

  • 11 authors
·
May 1, 2025 1

MAgICoRe: Multi-Agent, Iterative, Coarse-to-Fine Refinement for Reasoning

Large Language Models' (LLM) reasoning can be improved using test-time aggregation strategies, i.e., generating multiple samples and voting among generated samples. While these improve performance, they often reach a saturation point. Refinement offers an alternative by using LLM-generated feedback to improve solution quality. However, refinement introduces 3 key challenges: (1) Excessive refinement: Uniformly refining all instances can over-correct and reduce the overall performance. (2) Inability to localize and address errors: LLMs have a limited ability to self-correct and struggle to identify and correct their own mistakes. (3) Insufficient refinement: Deciding how many iterations of refinement are needed is non-trivial, and stopping too soon could leave errors unaddressed. To tackle these issues, we propose MAgICoRe, which avoids excessive refinement by categorizing problem difficulty as easy or hard, solving easy problems with coarse-grained aggregation and hard ones with fine-grained and iterative multi-agent refinement. To improve error localization, we incorporate external step-wise reward model (RM) scores. Moreover, to ensure effective refinement, we employ a multi-agent loop with three agents: Solver, Reviewer (which generates targeted feedback based on step-wise RM scores), and the Refiner (which incorporates feedback). To ensure sufficient refinement, we re-evaluate updated solutions, iteratively initiating further rounds of refinement. We evaluate MAgICoRe on Llama-3-8B and GPT-3.5 and show its effectiveness across 5 math datasets. Even one iteration of MAgICoRe beats Self-Consistency by 3.4%, Best-of-k by 3.2%, and Self-Refine by 4.0% while using less than half the samples. Unlike iterative refinement with baselines, MAgICoRe continues to improve with more iterations. Finally, our ablations highlight the importance of MAgICoRe's RMs and multi-agent communication.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 18, 2024

AceReason-Nemotron 1.1: Advancing Math and Code Reasoning through SFT and RL Synergy

In this work, we investigate the synergy between supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) in developing strong reasoning models. We begin by curating the SFT training data through two scaling strategies: increasing the number of collected prompts and the number of generated responses per prompt. Both approaches yield notable improvements in reasoning performance, with scaling the number of prompts resulting in more substantial gains. We then explore the following questions regarding the synergy between SFT and RL: (i) Does a stronger SFT model consistently lead to better final performance after large-scale RL training? (ii) How can we determine an appropriate sampling temperature during RL training to effectively balance exploration and exploitation for a given SFT initialization? Our findings suggest that (i) holds true, provided effective RL training is conducted, particularly when the sampling temperature is carefully chosen to maintain the temperature-adjusted entropy around 0.3, a setting that strikes a good balance between exploration and exploitation. Notably, the performance gap between initial SFT models narrows significantly throughout the RL process. Leveraging a strong SFT foundation and insights into the synergistic interplay between SFT and RL, our AceReason-Nemotron-1.1 7B model significantly outperforms AceReason-Nemotron-1.0 and achieves new state-of-the-art performance among Qwen2.5-7B-based reasoning models on challenging math and code benchmarks, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of our post-training recipe. We release the model and data at: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/AceReason-Nemotron-1.1-7B

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 16, 2025 4

Reinforcement Learning in the Era of LLMs: What is Essential? What is needed? An RL Perspective on RLHF, Prompting, and Beyond

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered wide attention and led to successful products such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. Their proficiency in adhering to instructions and delivering harmless, helpful, and honest (3H) responses can largely be attributed to the technique of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). In this paper, we aim to link the research in conventional RL to RL techniques used in LLM research. Demystify this technique by discussing why, when, and how RL excels. Furthermore, we explore potential future avenues that could either benefit from or contribute to RLHF research. Highlighted Takeaways: 1. RLHF is Online Inverse RL with Offline Demonstration Data. 2. RLHF > SFT because Imitation Learning (and Inverse RL) > Behavior Cloning (BC) by alleviating the problem of compounding error. 3. The RM step in RLHF generates a proxy of the expensive human feedback, such an insight can be generalized to other LLM tasks such as prompting evaluation and optimization where feedback is also expensive. 4. The policy learning in RLHF is more challenging than conventional problems studied in IRL due to their high action dimensionality and feedback sparsity. 5. The main superiority of PPO over off-policy value-based methods is its stability gained from (almost) on-policy data and conservative policy updates.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 9, 2023

Reviving DSP for Advanced Theorem Proving in the Era of Reasoning Models

Recent advancements, such as DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B and Kimina-Prover-Preview-72B, demonstrate a prevailing trend in leveraging reinforcement learning (RL)-based large-scale training for automated theorem proving. Surprisingly, we discover that even without any training, careful neuro-symbolic coordination of existing off-the-shelf reasoning models and tactic step provers can achieve comparable performance. This paper introduces DSP+, an improved version of the Draft, Sketch, and Prove framework, featuring a fine-grained and integrated neuro-symbolic enhancement for each phase: (1) In the draft phase, we prompt reasoning models to generate concise natural-language subgoals to benefit the sketch phase, removing thinking tokens and references to human-written proofs; (2) In the sketch phase, subgoals are autoformalized with hypotheses to benefit the proving phase, and sketch lines containing syntactic errors are masked according to predefined rules; (3) In the proving phase, we tightly integrate symbolic search methods like Aesop with step provers to establish proofs for the sketch subgoals. Experimental results show that, without any additional model training or fine-tuning, DSP+ solves 80.7\%, 32.8\%, and 24 out of 644 problems from miniF2F, ProofNet, and PutnamBench, respectively, while requiring fewer budgets compared to state-of-the-arts. DSP+ proves imo\_2019\_p1, an IMO problem in miniF2F that is not solved by any prior work. Additionally, DSP+ generates proof patterns comprehensible by human experts, facilitating the identification of formalization errors; For example, eight wrongly formalized statements in miniF2F are discovered. Our results highlight the potential of classical reasoning patterns besides the RL-based training. All components will be open-sourced.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 13, 2025

Reinforcement Learning from Automatic Feedback for High-Quality Unit Test Generation

Software testing is a crucial aspect of software development, and the creation of high-quality tests that adhere to best practices is essential for effective maintenance. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained popularity for code generation, including the automated creation of test cases. However, these LLMs are often trained on vast amounts of publicly available code, which may include test cases that do not adhere to best practices and may even contain test smells (anti-patterns). To address this issue, we propose a novel technique called Reinforcement Learning from Static Quality Metrics (RLSQM). To begin, we analyze the anti-patterns generated by the LLM and show that LLMs can generate undesirable test smells. Thus, we train specific reward models for each static quality metric, then utilize Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to train models for optimizing a single quality metric at a time. Furthermore, we amalgamate these rewards into a unified reward model aimed at capturing different best practices and quality aspects of tests. By comparing RL-trained models with those trained using supervised learning, we provide insights into how reliably utilize RL to improve test generation quality and into the effects of various training strategies. Our experimental results demonstrate that the RL-optimized model consistently generated high-quality test cases compared to the base LLM, improving the model by up to 21%, and successfully generates nearly 100% syntactically correct code. RLSQM also outperformed GPT-4 on four out of seven metrics. This represents a significant step towards enhancing the overall efficiency and reliability of software testing through Reinforcement Learning and static quality metrics. Our data are available at this link: https://figshare.com/s/ded476c8d4c221222849.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 3, 2023

CodeReviewQA: The Code Review Comprehension Assessment for Large Language Models

State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive code generation capabilities but struggle with real-world software engineering tasks, such as revising source code to address code reviews, hindering their practical use. Code review comments are often implicit, ambiguous, and colloquial, requiring models to grasp both code and human intent. This challenge calls for evaluating large language models' ability to bridge both technical and conversational contexts. While existing work has employed the automated code refinement (ACR) task to resolve these comments, current evaluation methods fall short, relying on text matching metrics that provide limited insight into model failures and remain susceptible to training data contamination. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel evaluation benchmark, CodeReviewQA that enables us to conduct fine-grained assessment of model capabilities and mitigate data contamination risks. In CodeReviewQA, we decompose the generation task of code refinement into three essential reasoning steps: change type recognition (CTR), change localisation (CL), and solution identification (SI). Each step is reformulated as multiple-choice questions with varied difficulty levels, enabling precise assessment of model capabilities, while mitigating data contamination risks. Our comprehensive evaluation spans 72 recently released large language models on 900 manually curated, high-quality examples across nine programming languages. Our results show that CodeReviewQA is able to expose specific model weaknesses in code review comprehension, disentangled from their generative automated code refinement results.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 20, 2025

WiNGPT-3.0 Technical Report

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit significant limitations, notably in structured, interpretable, and verifiable medical reasoning, alongside practical deployment challenges related to computational resources and data privacy. This report focused on the development of WiNGPT-3.0, the 32-billion parameter LLMs, engineered with the objective of enhancing its capacity for medical reasoning and exploring its potential for effective integration within healthcare IT infrastructures. The broader aim is to advance towards clinically applicable models. The approach involved a multi-stage training pipeline tailored for general, medical, and clinical reasoning. This pipeline incorporated supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging curated Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) datasets, auxiliary reward models, and an evidence-based diagnostic chain simulation. WiNGPT-3.0 demonstrated strong performance: specific model variants achieved scores of 66.6 on MedCalc and 87.1 on MedQA-USMLE. Furthermore, targeted training improved performance on a clinical reasoning task from a baseline score of 58.1 to 62.5. These findings suggest that reinforcement learning, even when applied with a limited dataset of only a few thousand examples, can enhance medical reasoning accuracy. Crucially, this demonstration of RL's efficacy with limited data and computation paves the way for more trustworthy and practically deployable LLMs within clinical workflows and health information infrastructures.

  • 13 authors
·
May 22, 2025

APOLLO: Automated LLM and Lean Collaboration for Advanced Formal Reasoning

Formal reasoning and automated theorem proving constitute a challenging subfield of machine learning, in which machines are tasked with proving mathematical theorems using formal languages like Lean. A formal verification system can check whether a formal proof is correct or not almost instantaneously, but generating a completely correct formal proof with large language models (LLMs) remains a formidable task. The usual approach in the literature is to prompt the LLM many times (up to several thousands) until one of the generated proofs passes the verification system. In this work, we present APOLLO (Automated PrOof repair via LLM and Lean cOllaboration), a modular, model-agnostic pipeline that combines the strengths of the Lean compiler with an LLM's reasoning abilities to achieve better proof-generation results at a low sampling budget. Apollo directs a fully automated process in which the LLM generates proofs for theorems, a set of agents analyze the proofs, fix the syntax errors, identify the mistakes in the proofs using Lean, isolate failing sub-lemmas, utilize automated solvers, and invoke an LLM on each remaining goal with a low top-K budget. The repaired sub-proofs are recombined and reverified, iterating up to a user-controlled maximum number of attempts. On the miniF2F benchmark, we establish a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 75.0% among 7B-parameter models while keeping the sampling budget below one thousand. Moreover, Apollo raises the state-of-the-art accuracy for Goedel-Prover-SFT to 65.6% while cutting sample complexity from 25,600 to a few hundred. General-purpose models (o3-mini, o4-mini) jump from 3-7% to over 40% accuracy. Our results demonstrate that targeted, compiler-guided repair of LLM outputs yields dramatic gains in both efficiency and correctness, suggesting a general paradigm for scalable automated theorem proving.

  • 3 authors
·
May 8, 2025

π_RL: Online RL Fine-tuning for Flow-based Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable robots to understand and perform complex tasks from multimodal input. Although recent work explores using reinforcement learning (RL) to automate the laborious data collection process in scaling supervised fine-tuning (SFT), applying large-scale RL to flow-based VLAs (e.g., pi_0, pi_{0.5}) remains challenging due to intractable action log-likelihoods from iterative denoising. We address this challenge with pi_{RL}, an open-source framework for training flow-based VLAs in parallel simulation. pi_{RL} implements two RL algorithms: (1) {Flow-Noise} models the denoising process as a discrete-time MDP with a learnable noise network for exact log-likelihood computation. (2) {Flow-SDE} integrates denoising with agent-environment interaction, formulating a two-layer MDP that employs ODE-to-SDE conversion for efficient RL exploration. We evaluate pi_{RL} on LIBERO and ManiSkill benchmarks. On LIBERO, pi_{RL} boosts few-shot SFT models pi_0 and pi_{0.5} from 57.6% to 97.6% and from 77.1% to 98.3%, respectively. In ManiSkill, we train pi_{RL} in 320 parallel environments, improving pi_0 from 41.6% to 85.7% and pi_{0.5} from 40.0% to 84.8% across 4352 pick-and-place tasks, demonstrating scalable multitask RL under heterogeneous simulation. Overall, pi_{RL} achieves significant performance gains and stronger generalization over SFT-models, validating the effectiveness of online RL for flow-based VLAs.

RLinf RLinf
·
Oct 29, 2025 4

Beyond SFT: Reinforcement Learning for Safer Large Reasoning Models with Better Reasoning Ability

Large reasoning models (LRMs) extend large language models by generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, significantly improving mathematical and logical problem solving. However, this explicit reasoning process also introduces new safety risks, as unsafe behaviors often emerge within intermediate reasoning trajectories, even when final answers appear harmless. Existing safety alignment approaches primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) over safety-oriented long CoT datasets. While intuitive, we find that SFT produces inconsistent safety improvements, degrades reasoning ability, and generalizes poorly across model families. These limitations suggest that purely supervised approaches are insufficient for robust safety alignment in LRMs. To address this, we investigate reinforcement learning (RL) as a complementary optimization framework for LRM safety training. Unlike SFT, RL directly optimizes model policies with reward feedback, enabling more adaptive and stable alignment. Extensive experiments across multiple model families and benchmarks show that RL achieves stronger and more consistent safety gains while maintaining reasoning competence. Further analysis of reflection dynamics and token-level entropy reveals that RL suppresses unsafe exploratory reasoning while preserving reflective depth, leading to safer and more reliable reasoning processes.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 1, 2025

The Path Not Taken: RLVR Provably Learns Off the Principals

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) reliably improves the reasoning performance of large language models, yet it appears to modify only a small fraction of parameters. We revisit this paradox and show that sparsity is a surface artifact of a model-conditioned optimization bias: for a fixed pretrained model, updates consistently localize to preferred parameter regions, highly consistent across runs and largely invariant to datasets and RL recipes. We mechanistically explain these dynamics with a Three-Gate Theory: Gate I (KL Anchor) imposes a KL-constrained update; Gate II (Model Geometry) steers the step off principal directions into low-curvature, spectrum-preserving subspaces; and Gate III (Precision) hides micro-updates in non-preferred regions, making the off-principal bias appear as sparsity. We then validate this theory and, for the first time, provide a parameter-level characterization of RLVR's learning dynamics: RLVR learns off principal directions in weight space, achieving gains via minimal spectral drift, reduced principal-subspace rotation, and off-principal update alignment. In contrast, SFT targets principal weights, distorts the spectrum, and even lags RLVR. Together, these results provide the first parameter-space account of RLVR's training dynamics, revealing clear regularities in how parameters evolve. Crucially, we show that RL operates in a distinct optimization regime from SFT, so directly adapting SFT-era parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods can be flawed, as evidenced by our case studies on advanced sparse fine-tuning and LoRA variants. We hope this work charts a path toward a white-box understanding of RLVR and the design of geometry-aware, RLVR-native learning algorithms, rather than repurposed SFT-era heuristics.

facebook AI at Meta
·
Nov 11, 2025 2

RESTL: Reinforcement Learning Guided by Multi-Aspect Rewards for Signal Temporal Logic Transformation

Signal Temporal Logic (STL) is a powerful formal language for specifying real-time specifications of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Transforming specifications written in natural language into STL formulas automatically has attracted increasing attention. Existing rule-based methods depend heavily on rigid pattern matching and domain-specific knowledge, limiting their generalizability and scalability. Recently, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) of large language models (LLMs) has been successfully applied to transform natural language into STL. However, the lack of fine-grained supervision on atomic proposition correctness, semantic fidelity, and formula readability often leads SFT-based methods to produce formulas misaligned with the intended meaning. To address these issues, we propose RESTL, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework for the transformation from natural language to STL. RESTL introduces multiple independently trained reward models that provide fine-grained, multi-faceted feedback from four perspectives, i.e., atomic proposition consistency, semantic alignment, formula succinctness, and symbol matching. These reward models are trained with a curriculum learning strategy to improve their feedback accuracy, and their outputs are aggregated into a unified signal that guides the optimization of the STL generator via Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). Experimental results demonstrate that RESTL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both automatic metrics and human evaluations.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 11, 2025

Breaking the SFT Plateau: Multimodal Structured Reinforcement Learning for Chart-to-Code Generation

While reinforcement learning (RL) has proven highly effective for general reasoning in vision-language models, its application to tasks requiring in-depth understanding of information-rich images and generation of structured outputs remains underexplored. Chart-to-code generation exemplifies this challenge, demanding complex reasoning over visual charts to generate structured code. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) alone is often insufficient, highlighting the need for effective RL strategies that appropriately reward structured outputs. We systematically investigate the performance plateau in SFT through large-scale experiments and propose Multimodal Structured Reinforcement Learning (MSRL) for chart-to-code generation, which substantially breaks through this plateau. We construct the largest training corpus to date, containing 3 million chart-code pairs from real-world arXiv tables to mitigate simplistic patterns of prior synthetic data. Despite reaching state-of-the-art performance, our experiments show that scaling SFT data eventually hits a plateau where further increases yield negligible improvements. Our MSRL method leverages a multi-granularity structured reward system using multimodal textual and visual feedback. At the textual level, rule-based rewards validate fine-grained code details. At the visual level, model-based rewards assess structural similarity by rendering generated code into images and employing an evaluator model. We implement this within a two-stage curriculum for training stability. Results demonstrate that MSRL significantly breaks the SFT plateau, improving high-level metrics by 6.2% and 9.9% on ChartMimic and ReachQA benchmarks respectively, achieving competitive performance with advanced closed-source models.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 19, 2025

DRIVE: Data Curation Best Practices for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward in Competitive Code Generation

Recent reasoning-first models (e.g., OpenAI o1, DeepSeek R1) have spurred a resurgence of interest in RLVR. Nevertheless, advances are dominated by mathematics (e.g., AIME), with competitive-programming code generation underexplored and data curation receiving less attention than RL algorithm design. We investigate how to construct RLVR datasets (i.e., RL prompts) and present practical training techniques that yield strong performance on competitive-programming code generation. Our pipeline begins with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) distilled from strong open-source models, augmented with general-purpose and reasoning-intensive data. RL then follows a two-stage process with executable, testcase-driven rewards: first, training on a large, uniformly distributed set of competitive-programming problems using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with 8 rollouts per prompt and a relatively short response-generation window (e.g., 32k during SFT and 24k in this stage) to expand entropy and mitigate repetition and truncation; second, we perform Pre-GRPO: updating on a small, high-quality set of challenging problems with a large rollout budget (64 rollouts per prompt) under a hard-focus curriculum that continuously retains the most difficult instances throughout training. We implement our method on Qwen2.5-32B and evaluate on LeetCode and Codeforces weekly contests to avoid data leakage. The resulting model achieves state-of-the-art performance among models of similar scale and is comparable to leading systems such as DeepSeek v3.1 and Doubao-1.5-Thinking. We also examine scaling trends and observe strong RL scaling on an internal large-scale MoE model. Our study distills concise best practices for data curation, entropy expansion, and curriculum design in RLVR for competitive-programming code generation.

tencent Tencent
·
Nov 9, 2025 5

CodeContests-O: Powering LLMs via Feedback-Driven Iterative Test Case Generation

The rise of reasoning models necessitates large-scale verifiable data, for which programming tasks serve as an ideal source. However, while competitive programming platforms provide abundant problems and solutions, high-quality test cases for verification remain scarce. Existing approaches attempt to synthesize test cases using Large Language Models (LLMs), but rely solely on the model's intrinsic generation capabilities without external feedback, frequently resulting in insufficiently diverse cases. To address this limitation, we propose a Feedback-Driven Iterative Framework for comprehensive test case construction. Specifically, our method leverages the LLM to generate initial test cases, executes them against known correct and incorrect solutions, and utilizes the failed results as feedback to guide the LLM in refining the test cases toward high fidelity and discriminability. We then apply this method to the CodeContests dataset to construct an optimized high-quality derivative, CodeContests-O. Evaluating against the entire pool of solutions (1.1 times 10^7 in total), our dataset achieves an average True Positive Rate (TPR) of 89.37% and True Negative Rate (TNR) of 90.89%, significantly outperforming the CodeContests and CodeContests+ by margins of 4.32% and 9.37%, respectively. Furthermore, fine-tuning the Qwen2.5-7B model on CodeContests-O results in a 9.52% improvement on LiveCodeBench (Pass@1). Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and the quality of CodeContests-O. To support reproducibility and facilitate future research, we release the https://github.com/cai-jianfeng/CodeContests-O{code} and https://huggingface.co/datasets/caijanfeng/CodeContests-O{dataset}.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 20

Thinking with Programming Vision: Towards a Unified View for Thinking with Images

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that think with images can interactively use tools to reason about visual inputs, but current approaches often rely on a narrow set of tools with limited real-world necessity and scalability. In this work, we first reveal a critical and previously overlooked weakness: even state-of-the-art MLLMs are surprisingly brittle, showing significant performance degradation on images with simple orientation changes or natural corruptions, underscoring the need for more robust tool-based reasoning. To address this, we propose CodeVision, a flexible and scalable code-as-tool framework where the model generates code as a universal interface to invoke any image operation, moving beyond fixed tool registries. We train our model using a two-stage methodology, beginning with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on a high-quality dataset curated for complex, multi-turn tool composition and error recovery, followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a novel and dense process reward function to encourage strategic and efficient tool use. To facilitate this research, we construct new SFT and RL datasets and introduce a challenging new benchmark suite designed to rigorously evaluate robustness to orientation changes and multi-tool reasoning. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL and Qwen3-VL series show that our approach significantly improves model performance and fosters emergent capabilities such as flexible tool composition, efficient chained execution, and robust error recovery from runtime feedback. Code is available at https://github.com/ByteDance-BandAI/CodeVision.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 3, 2025 1

Thyme: Think Beyond Images

Following OpenAI's introduction of the ``thinking with images'' concept, recent efforts have explored stimulating the use of visual information in the reasoning process to enhance model performance in perception and reasoning tasks. However, to the best of our knowledge, no open-source work currently offers a feature set as rich as proprietary models (O3), which can perform diverse image manipulations and simultaneously enhance logical reasoning capabilities through code. In this paper, we make a preliminary attempt in this direction by introducing Thyme (Think Beyond Images), a novel paradigm for enabling MLLMs to transcend existing ``think with images'' approaches by autonomously generating and executing diverse image processing and computational operations via executable code. This approach not only facilitates a rich, on-the-fly set of image manipulations (e.g., cropping, rotation, contrast enhancement) but also allows for mathematical computations, all while maintaining high autonomy in deciding when and how to apply these operations. We activate this capability through a two-stage training strategy: an initial SFT on a curated dataset of 500K samples to teach code generation, followed by a RL phase to refine decision-making. For the RL stage, we manually collect and design high-resolution question-answer pairs to increase the learning difficulty, and we propose GRPO-ATS (Group Relative Policy Optimization with Adaptive Temperature Sampling), an algorithm that applies distinct temperatures to text and code generation to balance reasoning exploration with code execution precision. We conduct extensive experimental analysis and ablation studies. Comprehensive evaluations on nearly 20 benchmarks show that Thyme yields significant and consistent performance gains, particularly in challenging high-resolution perception and complex reasoning tasks.

  • 20 authors
·
Aug 15, 2025 5

Can Language Models Falsify? Evaluating Algorithmic Reasoning with Counterexample Creation

There is growing excitement about the potential of Language Models (LMs) to accelerate scientific discovery. Falsifying hypotheses is key to scientific progress, as it allows claims to be iteratively refined over time. This process requires significant researcher effort, reasoning, and ingenuity. Yet current benchmarks for LMs predominantly assess their ability to generate solutions rather than challenge them. We advocate for developing benchmarks that evaluate this inverse capability - creating counterexamples for subtly incorrect solutions. To demonstrate this approach, we start with the domain of algorithmic problem solving, where counterexamples can be evaluated automatically using code execution. Specifically, we introduce REFUTE, a dynamically updating benchmark that includes recent problems and incorrect submissions from programming competitions, where human experts successfully identified counterexamples. Our analysis finds that the best reasoning agents, even OpenAI o3-mini (high) with code execution feedback, can create counterexamples for only <9% of incorrect solutions in REFUTE, even though ratings indicate its ability to solve up to 48% of these problems from scratch. We hope our work spurs progress in evaluating and enhancing LMs' ability to falsify incorrect solutions - a capability that is crucial for both accelerating research and making models self-improve through reliable reflective reasoning.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 26, 2025 2

Towards Neural Synthesis for SMT-Assisted Proof-Oriented Programming

Proof-oriented programs mix computational content with proofs of program correctness. However, the human effort involved in programming and proving is still substantial, despite the use of Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers to automate proofs in languages such as F*. Seeking to spur research on using AI to automate the construction of proof-oriented programs, we curate a dataset of 600K lines of open-source F* programs and proofs, including software used in production systems ranging from Windows and Linux, to Python and Firefox. Our dataset includes around 32K top-level F* definitions, each representing a type-directed program and proof synthesis problem -- producing a definition given a formal specification expressed as an F* type. We provide a program-fragment checker that queries F* to check the correctness of candidate solutions. We believe this is the largest corpus of SMT-assisted program proofs coupled with a reproducible program-fragment checker. Grounded in this dataset, we investigate the use of AI to synthesize programs and their proofs in F*, with promising results. Our main finding in that the performance of fine-tuned smaller language models (such as Phi-2 or StarCoder) compare favorably with large language models (such as GPT-4), at a much lower computational cost. We also identify various type-based retrieval augmentation techniques and find that they boost performance significantly. With detailed error analysis and case studies, we identify potential strengths and weaknesses of models and techniques and suggest directions for future improvements.

  • 7 authors
·
May 2, 2024

From Verifiable Dot to Reward Chain: Harnessing Verifiable Reference-based Rewards for Reinforcement Learning of Open-ended Generation

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) succeeds in reasoning tasks (e.g., math and code) by checking the final verifiable answer (i.e., a verifiable dot signal). However, extending this paradigm to open-ended generation is challenging because there is no unambiguous ground truth. Relying on single-dot supervision often leads to inefficiency and reward hacking. To address these issues, we propose reinforcement learning with verifiable reference-based rewards (RLVRR). Instead of checking the final answer, RLVRR extracts an ordered linguistic signal from high-quality references (i.e, reward chain). Specifically, RLVRR decomposes rewards into two dimensions: content, which preserves deterministic core concepts (e.g., keywords), and style, which evaluates adherence to stylistic properties through LLM-based verification. In this way, RLVRR combines the exploratory strength of RL with the efficiency and reliability of supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Extensive experiments on more than 10 benchmarks with Qwen and Llama models confirm the advantages of our approach. RLVRR (1) substantially outperforms SFT trained with ten times more data and advanced reward models, (2) unifies the training of structured reasoning and open-ended generation, and (3) generalizes more effectively while preserving output diversity. These results establish RLVRR as a principled and efficient path toward verifiable reinforcement learning for general-purpose LLM alignment. We release our code and data at https://github.com/YJiangcm/RLVRR.

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 26

Klear-Reasoner: Advancing Reasoning Capability via Gradient-Preserving Clipping Policy Optimization

We present Klear-Reasoner, a model with long reasoning capabilities that demonstrates careful deliberation during problem solving, achieving outstanding performance across multiple benchmarks. Although there are already many excellent works related to inference models in the current community, there are still many problems with reproducing high-performance inference models due to incomplete disclosure of training details. This report provides an in-depth analysis of the reasoning model, covering the entire post-training workflow from data preparation and long Chain-of-Thought supervised fine-tuning (long CoT SFT) to reinforcement learning (RL), along with detailed ablation studies for each experimental component. For SFT data, our experiments show that a small number of high-quality data sources are more effective than a large number of diverse data sources, and that difficult samples can achieve better results without accuracy filtering. In addition, we investigate two key issues with current clipping mechanisms in RL: Clipping suppresses critical exploration signals and ignores suboptimal trajectories. To address these challenges, we propose Gradient-Preserving clipping Policy Optimization (GPPO) that gently backpropagates gradients from clipped tokens. GPPO not only enhances the model's exploration capacity but also improves its efficiency in learning from negative samples. Klear-Reasoner exhibits exceptional reasoning abilities in mathematics and programming, scoring 90.5\% on AIME 2024, 83.2\% on AIME 2025, 66.0\% on LiveCodeBench V5 and 58.1\% on LiveCodeBench V6.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 11, 2025 4

Formal that "Floats" High: Formal Verification of Floating Point Arithmetic

Formal verification of floating-point arithmetic remains challenging due to non-linear arithmetic behavior and the tight coupling between control and datapath logic. Existing approaches often rely on high-level C models for equivalence checking against Register Transfer Level (RTL) designs, but this introduces abstraction gaps, translation overhead, and limits scalability at the RTL level. To address these challenges, this paper presents a scalable methodology for verifying floating-point arithmetic using direct RTL-to-RTL model checking against a golden reference model. The approach adopts a divide-and conquer strategy that decomposes verification into modular stages, each captured by helper assertions and lemmas that collectively prove a main correctness theorem. Counterexample (CEX)-guided refinement is used to iteratively localize and resolve implementation defects, while targeted fault injection validates the robustness of the verification process against precision-critical datapath errors. To assess scalability and practicality, the methodology is extended with agentic AI-based formal property generation, integrating large language model (LLM)-driven automation with Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) refinement. Coverage analysis evaluates the effectiveness of the approach by comparing handwritten and AI-generated properties in both RTL-to-RTL model checking and standalone RTL verification settings. Results show that direct RTL-to-RTL model checking achieves higher coverage efficiency and requires fewer assertions than standalone verification, especially when combined with AI-generated properties refined through HITL guidance.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 7, 2025

CodeV-R1: Reasoning-Enhanced Verilog Generation

Large language models (LLMs) trained via reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) have achieved breakthroughs on tasks with explicit, automatable verification, such as software programming and mathematical problems. Extending RLVR to electronic design automation (EDA), especially automatically generating hardware description languages (HDLs) like Verilog from natural-language (NL) specifications, however, poses three key challenges: the lack of automated and accurate verification environments, the scarcity of high-quality NL-code pairs, and the prohibitive computation cost of RLVR. To this end, we introduce CodeV-R1, an RLVR framework for training Verilog generation LLMs. First, we develop a rule-based testbench generator that performs robust equivalence checking against golden references. Second, we propose a round-trip data synthesis method that pairs open-source Verilog snippets with LLM-generated NL descriptions, verifies code-NL-code consistency via the generated testbench, and filters out inequivalent examples to yield a high-quality dataset. Third, we employ a two-stage "distill-then-RL" training pipeline: distillation for the cold start of reasoning abilities, followed by adaptive DAPO, our novel RLVR algorithm that can reduce training cost by adaptively adjusting sampling rate. The resulting model, CodeV-R1-7B, achieves 68.6% and 72.9% pass@1 on VerilogEval v2 and RTLLM v1.1, respectively, surpassing prior state-of-the-art by 12~20%, while matching or even exceeding the performance of 671B DeepSeek-R1. We will release our model, training pipeline, and dataset to facilitate research in EDA and LLM communities.

  • 19 authors
·
May 29, 2025 2

InT: Self-Proposed Interventions Enable Credit Assignment in LLM Reasoning

Outcome-reward reinforcement learning (RL) has proven effective at improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, standard RL assigns credit only at the level of the final answer, penalizing entire reasoning traces when the outcome is incorrect and uniformly reinforcing all steps when it is correct. As a result, correct intermediate steps may be discouraged in failed traces, while spurious steps may be reinforced in successful ones. We refer to this failure mode as the problem of credit assignment. While a natural remedy is to train a process reward model, accurately optimizing such models to identify corrective reasoning steps remains challenging. We introduce Intervention Training (InT), a training paradigm in which the model performs fine-grained credit assignment on its own reasoning traces by proposing short, targeted corrections that steer trajectories toward higher reward. Using reference solutions commonly available in mathematical reasoning datasets and exploiting the fact that verifying a model-generated solution is easier than generating a correct one from scratch, the model identifies the first error in its reasoning and proposes a single-step intervention to redirect the trajectory toward the correct solution. We then apply supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to the on-policy rollout up to the point of error concatenated with the intervention, localizing error to the specific step that caused failure. We show that the resulting model serves as a far better initialization for RL training. After running InT and subsequent fine-tuning with RL, we improve accuracy by nearly 14% over a 4B-parameter base model on IMO-AnswerBench, outperforming larger open-source models such as gpt-oss-20b.

Can One Domain Help Others? A Data-Centric Study on Multi-Domain Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Existing research has predominantly concentrated on isolated reasoning domains such as mathematical problem-solving, coding tasks, or logical reasoning. However, real world reasoning scenarios inherently demand an integrated application of multiple cognitive skills. Despite this, the interplay among these reasoning skills under reinforcement learning remains poorly understood. To bridge this gap, we present a systematic investigation of multi-domain reasoning within the RLVR framework, explicitly focusing on three primary domains: mathematical reasoning, code generation, and logical puzzle solving. We conduct a comprehensive study comprising four key components: (1) Leveraging the GRPO algorithm and the Qwen-2.5-7B model family, our study thoroughly evaluates the models' in-domain improvements and cross-domain generalization capabilities when trained on single-domain datasets. (2) Additionally, we examine the intricate interactions including mutual enhancements and conflicts that emerge during combined cross-domain training. (3) To further understand the influence of SFT on RL, we also analyze and compare performance differences between base and instruct models under identical RL configurations. (4) Furthermore, we delve into critical RL training details, systematically exploring the impacts of curriculum learning strategies, variations in reward design, and language-specific factors. Through extensive experiments, our results offer significant insights into the dynamics governing domain interactions, revealing key factors influencing both specialized and generalizable reasoning performance. These findings provide valuable guidance for optimizing RL methodologies to foster comprehensive, multi-domain reasoning capabilities in LLMs.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 23, 2025 1

Rethinking Verification for LLM Code Generation: From Generation to Testing

Large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved notable success in code-generation benchmarks such as HumanEval and LiveCodeBench. However, a detailed examination reveals that these evaluation suites often comprise only a limited number of homogeneous test cases, resulting in subtle faults going undetected. This not only artificially inflates measured performance but also compromises accurate reward estimation in reinforcement learning frameworks utilizing verifiable rewards (RLVR). To address these critical shortcomings, we systematically investigate the test-case generation (TCG) task by proposing multi-dimensional metrics designed to rigorously quantify test-suite thoroughness. Furthermore, we introduce a human-LLM collaborative method (SAGA), leveraging human programming expertise with LLM reasoning capability, aimed at significantly enhancing both the coverage and the quality of generated test cases. In addition, we develop a TCGBench to facilitate the study of the TCG task. Experiments show that SAGA achieves a detection rate of 90.62% and a verifier accuracy of 32.58% on TCGBench. The Verifier Accuracy (Verifier Acc) of the code generation evaluation benchmark synthesized by SAGA is 10.78% higher than that of LiveCodeBench-v6. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. We hope this work contributes to building a scalable foundation for reliable LLM code evaluation, further advancing RLVR in code generation, and paving the way for automated adversarial test synthesis and adaptive benchmark integration.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 9, 2025 1

Think2SQL: Reinforce LLM Reasoning Capabilities for Text2SQL

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in transforming natural language questions about relational databases into SQL queries. Despite recent improvements, small LLMs struggle to handle questions involving multiple tables and complex SQL patterns under a Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) setting. Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) partially compensate the knowledge deficits in pretrained models but falls short while dealing with queries involving multi-hop reasoning. To bridge this gap, different LLM training strategies to reinforce reasoning capabilities have been proposed, ranging from leveraging a thinking process within ZSL, including reasoning traces in SFT, or adopt Reinforcement Learning (RL) strategies. However, the influence of reasoning on Text2SQL performance is still largely unexplored. This paper investigates to what extent LLM reasoning capabilities influence their Text2SQL performance on four benchmark datasets. To this end, it considers the following LLM settings: (1) ZSL, including general-purpose reasoning or not; (2) SFT, with and without task-specific reasoning traces; (3) RL, leveraging execution accuracy as primary reward function; (4) SFT+RL, i.e, a two-stage approach that combines SFT and RL. The results show that general-purpose reasoning under ZSL proves to be ineffective in tackling complex Text2SQL cases. Small LLMs benefit from SFT with reasoning much more than larger ones, bridging the gap of their (weaker) model pretraining. RL is generally beneficial across all tested models and datasets, particularly when SQL queries involve multi-hop reasoning and multiple tables. Small LLMs with SFT+RL excel on most complex datasets thanks to a strategic balance between generality of the reasoning process and optimization of the execution accuracy. Thanks to RL, the7B Qwen-Coder-2.5 model performs on par with 100+ Billion ones on the Bird dataset.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 21, 2025

RefineBench: Evaluating Refinement Capability of Language Models via Checklists

Can language models (LMs) self-refine their own responses? This question is increasingly relevant as a wide range of real-world user interactions involve refinement requests. However, prior studies have largely tested LMs' refinement abilities on verifiable tasks such as competition math or symbolic reasoning with simplified scaffolds, whereas users often pose open-ended queries and provide varying degrees of feedback on what they desire. The recent advent of reasoning models that exhibit self-reflection patterns in their chains-of-thought further motivates this question. To analyze this, we introduce RefineBench, a benchmark of 1,000 challenging problems across 11 domains paired with a checklist-based evaluation framework. We evaluate two refinement modes: (1) guided refinement, where an LM is provided natural language feedback, and (2) self-refinement, where LMs attempt to improve without guidance. In the self-refinement setting, even frontier LMs such as Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT-5 achieve modest baseline scores of 31.3% and 29.1%, respectively, and most models fail to consistently improve across iterations (e.g., Gemini-2.5-Pro gains only +1.8%, while DeepSeek-R1 declines by -0.1%). By contrast, in guided refinement, both proprietary LMs and large open-weight LMs (>70B) can leverage targeted feedback to refine responses to near-perfect levels within five turns. These findings suggest that frontier LMs require breakthroughs to self-refine their incorrect responses, and that RefineBench provides a valuable testbed for tracking progress.

R1-Fuzz: Specializing Language Models for Textual Fuzzing via Reinforcement Learning

Fuzzing is effective for vulnerability discovery but struggles with complex targets such as compilers, interpreters, and database engines, which accept textual input that must satisfy intricate syntactic and semantic constraints. Although language models (LMs) have attracted interest for this task due to their vast latent knowledge and reasoning potential, their practical adoption has been limited. The major challenges stem from insufficient exploration of deep program logic among real-world codebases, and the high cost of leveraging larger models. To overcome these challenges, we propose R1-Fuzz, the first framework that leverages reinforcement learning (RL) to specialize cost-efficient LMs and integrate them for complex textual fuzzing input generation. R1-Fuzz introduces two key designs: coverage-slicing-based question construction and a distance-based reward calculation. Through RL-based post-training of a model with our constructed dataset, R1-Fuzz designs a fuzzing workflow that tightly integrates LMs to reason deep program semantics during fuzzing. Evaluations on diverse real-world targets show that our design enables a small model, named R1-Fuzz-7B, to rival or even outperform much larger models in real-world fuzzing. Notably, R1-Fuzz achieves up to 75\% higher coverage than state-of-the-art fuzzers and discovers 29 previously unknown vulnerabilities, demonstrating its practicality.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 21, 2025

CLS-RL: Image Classification with Rule-Based Reinforcement Learning

Classification is a core task in machine learning. Recent research has shown that although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are initially poor at image classification, fine-tuning them with an adequate amount of data can significantly enhance their performance, making them comparable to SOTA classification models. However, acquiring large-scale labeled data is expensive. In this paper, we explore few-shot MLLM classification fine-tuning. We found that SFT can cause severe overfitting issues and may even degrade performance over the zero-shot approach. To address this challenge, inspired by the recent successes in rule-based reinforcement learning, we propose CLS-RL, which uses verifiable signals as reward to fine-tune MLLMs. We discovered that CLS-RL outperforms SFT in most datasets and has a much higher average accuracy on both base-to-new and few-shot learning setting. Moreover, we observed a free-lunch phenomenon for CLS-RL; when models are fine-tuned on a particular dataset, their performance on other distinct datasets may also improve over zero-shot models, even if those datasets differ in distribution and class names. This suggests that RL-based methods effectively teach models the fundamentals of classification. Lastly, inspired by recent works in inference time thinking, we re-examine the `thinking process' during fine-tuning, a critical aspect of RL-based methods, in the context of visual classification. We question whether such tasks require extensive thinking process during fine-tuning, proposing that this may actually detract from performance. Based on this premise, we introduce the No-Thinking-CLS-RL method, which minimizes thinking processes during training by setting an equality accuracy reward. Our findings indicate that, with much less fine-tuning time, No-Thinking-CLS-RL method achieves superior in-domain performance and generalization capabilities than CLS-RL.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 20, 2025 2

Are "Solved Issues" in SWE-bench Really Solved Correctly? An Empirical Study

Automated issue solving aims to resolve real-world issues in software repositories. The most popular benchmarks for automated issue solving are SWE-bench and its human-filtered subset SWE-bench Verified. These benchmarks leverage testing to validate generated patches. However, because testing is rarely exhaustive, a patch may pass the tests but nevertheless fail to match the developers' expectations. Unfortunately, it is currently unclear to what extent evaluations performed with SWE-bench suffer from such plausible but incorrect patches. This paper presents an in-depth empirical study of the correctness of plausible patches generated by three state-of-the-art issue-solving tools evaluated on SWE-bench Verified. We extensively test and inspect generated patches, and compare them against human-written ground truth patches. The core of our methodology is a novel technique PatchDiff for differential patch testing, which automatically exposes behavioral discrepancies between two patches. Our findings reveal critical weaknesses in SWE-bench's patch validation mechanism, which causes 7.8% of all patches to count as correct while failing the developer-written test suite. Moreover, our novel automated technique reveals that even more (29.6%) plausible patches induce different behavior than the ground truth patches. These behavioral differences are often due to similar, but divergent implementations (46.8%) and due to generated patches that adapt more behavior than the ground truth patches (27.3%). Our manual inspection shows that 28.6% of behaviorally divergent patches are certainly incorrect. Combined, the different weaknesses lead to an inflation of reported resolution rates by 6.2 absolute percent points. Our findings are a call to arms for more robust and reliable evaluation of issue-solving tools. We envision our automated differential patch testing technique to be useful for this purpose.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 19, 2025

Learning Only with Images: Visual Reinforcement Learning with Reasoning, Rendering, and Visual Feedback

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit impressive performance across various visual tasks. Subsequent investigations into enhancing their visual reasoning abilities have significantly expanded their performance envelope. However, a critical bottleneck in the advancement of MLLMs toward deep visual reasoning is their heavy reliance on curated image-text supervision. To solve this problem, we introduce a novel framework, ``Reasoning-Rendering-Visual-Feedback'' (RRVF), that enables MLLMs to learn complex visual reasoning from only raw images. This framework builds on the ``Asymmetry of Verification'' principle, i.e., verifying the rendered output against the source image is substantially easier than performing deep visual reasoning to generate a faithful, structured representation such as code. We demonstrate that this relative ease provides an ideal reward signal for optimization via Reinforcement Learning (RL), thereby reducing reliance on image-text supervision. RRVF implements a closed-loop iterative process encompassing reasoning, rendering, and visual feedback components, enabling the model to perform complex reasoning, including self-correction through multi-turn interactions. This process is optimized end-to-end using the GRPO algorithm. Extensive evaluations are conducted on image-to-code generation across two diverse domains: data charts and web interfaces. The RRVF-trained model not only outperforms existing similarly sized open-source MLLMs and supervised fine-tuning baselines but also exhibits superior generalization. Notably, the model outperforms the more advanced MLLM used to generate visual feedback during training. Code is available at https://github.com/L-O-I/RRVF.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 28, 2025

Evolving Diagnostic Agents in a Virtual Clinical Environment

In this paper, we present a framework for training large language models (LLMs) as diagnostic agents with reinforcement learning, enabling them to manage multi-turn diagnostic processes, adaptively select examinations, and commit to final diagnoses. Unlike instruction-tuned models trained on static case summaries, our method acquires diagnostic strategies through interactive exploration and outcome-based feedback. Our contributions are fourfold: (i) We present DiagGym, a diagnostics world model trained with electronic health records that emits examination outcomes conditioned on patient history and recommended examination, serving as a virtual clinical environment for realistic diagnosis training and evaluation; (ii) We train DiagAgent via end-to-end, multi-turn reinforcement learning to learn diagnostic policies that optimize both information yield and diagnostic accuracy; (iii) We introduce DiagBench, a diagnostic benchmark comprising 750 cases with physician-validated examination recommendations and 99 cases annotated with 973 physician-written rubrics on diagnosis process; (iv) we demonstrate superior performance across diverse diagnostic settings. DiagAgent significantly outperforms 10 state-of-the-art LLMs, including DeepSeek-v3 and GPT-4o, as well as two prompt-engineered agents. In single-turn settings, DiagAgent achieves 9.34% higher diagnostic accuracy and 44.03% improvement in examination recommendation hit ratio. In end-to-end settings, it delivers 15.12% increase in diagnostic accuracy and 23.09% boost in examination recommendation F1 score. In rubric-based evaluation, it surpasses the next-best model, Claude-sonnet-4, by 7.1% in weighted rubric score. These findings indicate that learning policies in interactive clinical environments confers dynamic and clinically meaningful diagnostic management abilities unattainable through passive training alone.

MEDDxAgent: A Unified Modular Agent Framework for Explainable Automatic Differential Diagnosis

Differential Diagnosis (DDx) is a fundamental yet complex aspect of clinical decision-making, in which physicians iteratively refine a ranked list of possible diseases based on symptoms, antecedents, and medical knowledge. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in supporting DDx, existing approaches face key limitations, including single-dataset evaluations, isolated optimization of components, unrealistic assumptions about complete patient profiles, and single-attempt diagnosis. We introduce a Modular Explainable DDx Agent (MEDDxAgent) framework designed for interactive DDx, where diagnostic reasoning evolves through iterative learning, rather than assuming a complete patient profile is accessible. MEDDxAgent integrates three modular components: (1) an orchestrator (DDxDriver), (2) a history taking simulator, and (3) two specialized agents for knowledge retrieval and diagnosis strategy. To ensure robust evaluation, we introduce a comprehensive DDx benchmark covering respiratory, skin, and rare diseases. We analyze single-turn diagnostic approaches and demonstrate the importance of iterative refinement when patient profiles are not available at the outset. Our broad evaluation demonstrates that MEDDxAgent achieves over 10% accuracy improvements in interactive DDx across both large and small LLMs, while offering critical explainability into its diagnostic reasoning process.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 26, 2025

AceReason-Nemotron: Advancing Math and Code Reasoning through Reinforcement Learning

Despite recent progress in large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) for reasoning, the training recipe for building high-performing reasoning models remains elusive. Key implementation details of frontier models, such as DeepSeek-R1, including data curation strategies and RL training recipe, are often omitted. Moreover, recent research indicates distillation remains more effective than RL for smaller models. In this work, we demonstrate that large-scale RL can significantly enhance the reasoning capabilities of strong, small- and mid-sized models, achieving results that surpass those of state-of-the-art distillation-based models. We systematically study the RL training process through extensive ablations and propose a simple yet effective approach: first training on math-only prompts, then on code-only prompts. Notably, we find that math-only RL not only significantly enhances the performance of strong distilled models on math benchmarks (e.g., +14.6% / +17.2% on AIME 2025 for the 7B / 14B models), but also code reasoning tasks (e.g., +6.8% / +5.8% on LiveCodeBench for the 7B / 14B models). In addition, extended code-only RL iterations further improve performance on code benchmarks with minimal or no degradation in math results. We develop a robust data curation pipeline to collect challenging prompts with high-quality, verifiable answers and test cases to enable verification-based RL across both domains. Finally, we identify key experimental insights, including curriculum learning with progressively increasing response lengths and the stabilizing effect of on-policy parameter updates. We find that RL not only elicits the foundational reasoning capabilities acquired during pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (e.g., distillation), but also pushes the limits of the model's reasoning ability, enabling it to solve problems that were previously unsolvable.

  • 8 authors
·
May 22, 2025 2

Iterative Self-Training for Code Generation via Reinforced Re-Ranking

Generating high-quality code that solves complex programming tasks is challenging, especially with current decoder-based models that produce highly stochastic outputs. In code generation, even minor errors can easily break the entire solution. Leveraging multiple sampled solutions can significantly improve the overall output quality. One effective way to enhance code generation is by pairing a code generation model with a reranker model, which selects the best solution from the generated samples. We propose a novel iterative self-training approach for self-training reranker models using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), aimed at improving both reranking accuracy and the overall code generation process. Unlike traditional PPO approaches, where the focus is on optimizing a generative model with a reward model, our approach emphasizes the development of a robust reward/reranking model. This model improves the quality of generated code through reranking and addresses problems and errors that the reward model might overlook during PPO alignment with the reranker. Our method iteratively refines the training dataset by re-evaluating outputs, identifying high-scoring negative examples, and incorporating them into the training loop, that boosting model performance. Our evaluation on the MultiPL-E dataset demonstrates that our 13.4B parameter model outperforms a 33B model in code generation quality while being three times faster. Moreover, it achieves performance comparable to GPT-4 and surpasses it in one programming language.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 13, 2025 2

RethinkMCTS: Refining Erroneous Thoughts in Monte Carlo Tree Search for Code Generation

LLM agents enhanced by tree search algorithms have yielded notable performances in code generation. However, current search algorithms in this domain suffer from low search quality due to several reasons: 1) Ineffective design of the search space for the high-reasoning demands of code generation tasks, 2) Inadequate integration of code feedback with the search algorithm, and 3) Poor handling of negative feedback during the search, leading to reduced search efficiency and quality. To address these challenges, we propose to search for the reasoning process of the code and use the detailed feedback of code execution to refine erroneous thoughts during the search. In this paper, we introduce RethinkMCTS, which employs the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to conduct thought-level searches before generating code, thereby exploring a wider range of strategies. More importantly, we construct verbal feedback from fine-grained code execution feedback to refine erroneous thoughts during the search. This ensures that the search progresses along the correct reasoning paths, thus improving the overall search quality of the tree by leveraging execution feedback. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that RethinkMCTS outperforms previous search-based and feedback-based code generation baselines. On the HumanEval dataset, it improves the pass@1 of GPT-3.5-turbo from 70.12 to 89.02 and GPT-4o-mini from 87.20 to 94.51. It effectively conducts more thorough exploration through thought-level searches and enhances the search quality of the entire tree by incorporating rethink operation.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 14, 2024

Towards Understanding Bugs in Distributed Training and Inference Frameworks for Large Language Models

With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), distributed training and inference frameworks like DeepSpeed have become essential for scaling model training and inference across multiple GPUs or nodes. However, the increasing complexity of these frameworks brings non-trivial software bugs, which may degrade training performance, cause unexpected failures, and result in significant resource waste. Understanding framework bugs' characteristics is fundamental for quality assurance, allowing the design of more effective debugging and repair methods. Thus, our paper conducts the first large-scale empirical analysis of 308 fixed bugs across three popular distributed training/inference frameworks: DeepSpeed, Megatron-LM, and Colossal-AI. We examine bug symptoms, root causes, bug identification and fixing efforts, and common low-effort fixing strategies. Additionally, the distributed nature of these frameworks introduces unique bug root causes, such as allocation strategy error and distributed communication error. Diagnosing and fixing complex bugs remains challenging due to factors like the disconnect between symptoms and root causes, high bug reproduction costs, and low-level or cross-component interactions. Interestingly, we observe that 48% of bug fixes require minimal code changes (<=10 LOC) and follow simple strategies such as conditional logic optimization, parameter handling enhancement, or version compatibility handling, indicating potential for automation. Based on these insights, we offer several implications for improving the reliability of both distributed training and inference frameworks and their dependent LLM projects, while also identifying opportunities to leverage LLM-based tools for automated debugging and repair.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 12, 2025 1

Optimizing Test-Time Compute via Meta Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

Training models to effectively use test-time compute is crucial for improving the reasoning performance of LLMs. Current methods mostly do so via fine-tuning on search traces or running RL with 0/1 outcome reward, but do these approaches efficiently utilize test-time compute? Would these approaches continue to scale as the budget improves? In this paper, we try to answer these questions. We formalize the problem of optimizing test-time compute as a meta-reinforcement learning (RL) problem, which provides a principled perspective on spending test-time compute. This perspective enables us to view the long output stream from the LLM as consisting of several episodes run at test time and leads us to use a notion of cumulative regret over output tokens as a way to measure the efficacy of test-time compute. Akin to how RL algorithms can best tradeoff exploration and exploitation over training, minimizing cumulative regret would also provide the best balance between exploration and exploitation in the token stream. While we show that state-of-the-art models do not minimize regret, one can do so by maximizing a dense reward bonus in conjunction with the outcome 0/1 reward RL. This bonus is the ''progress'' made by each subsequent block in the output stream, quantified by the change in the likelihood of eventual success. Using these insights, we develop Meta Reinforcement Fine-Tuning, or MRT, a new class of fine-tuning methods for optimizing test-time compute. MRT leads to a 2-3x relative gain in performance and roughly a 1.5x gain in token efficiency for math reasoning compared to outcome-reward RL.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025 2

CodeV: Code with Images for Faithful Visual Reasoning via Tool-Aware Policy Optimization

Agentic vision-language models are increasingly trained to "think with images" by calling image operations. However, we show that high final-answer accuracy often hides unfaithful visual reasoning: models may invoke tools on irrelevant regions or ignore tool outputs entirely, yet still guess the correct answer. In this work, we first propose a faithfulness evaluation protocol that measures whether intermediate visual tool outputs (e.g., crops) actually contain the queried evidence. This reveals that recent visual agents achieve high final-answer accuracy but exhibit low rates of faithful tool-use on visual search benchmarks. We then introduce CodeV, a code-based visual agent trained with Tool-Aware Policy Optimization (TAPO). TAPO is a process-level RL framework that augments GRPO with dense rewards defined directly on visual tool inputs and outputs, rather than on chain-of-thought tokens, making supervision easier to verify and less susceptible to reward hacking. CodeV represents visual tools as executable Python code, and TAPO assigns step-wise rewards based solely on the question and tool output, encouraging both necessary and evidence-consistent tool use. In a two-stage SFT+RL pipeline, CodeV achieves competitive or superior accuracy while substantially increasing faithful tool-use rates on related visual search benchmarks. Beyond visual search, CodeV attains strong performance on a range of multimodal reasoning and math benchmarks, suggesting that explicitly supervising intermediate tool behavior is crucial for building trustworthy, agentic visual reasoning systems.

umich University of Michigan
·
Nov 24, 2025 2

ViTAD: Timing Violation-Aware Debugging of RTL Code using Large Language Models

In modern Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuit design flow, the Register-Transfer Level (RTL) stage presents a critical opportunity for timing optimization. Addressing timing violations at this early stage is essential, as modern systems demand higher speeds, where even minor timing violations can lead to functional failures or system crashes. However, traditional timing optimization heavily relies on manual expertise, requiring engineers to iteratively analyze timing reports and debug. To automate this process, this paper proposes ViTAD, a method that efficiently analyzes the root causes of timing violations and dynamically generates targeted repair strategies. Specifically, we first parse Verilog code and timing reports to construct a Signal Timing Dependency Graph (STDG). Based on the STDG, we perform violation path analysis and use large language models (LLMs) to infer the root causes of violations. Finally, by analyzing the causes of violations, we selectively retrieve relevant debugging knowledge from a domain-specific knowledge base to generate customized repair solutions. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we construct a timing violation dataset based on real-world open-source projects. This dataset contains 54 cases of violations. Experimental results show that our method achieves a 73.68% success rate in repairing timing violations, while the baseline using only LLM is 54.38%. Our method improves the success rate by 19.30%.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 18, 2025

Demystifying Reinforcement Learning in Agentic Reasoning

Recently, the emergence of agentic RL has showcased that RL could also effectively improve the agentic reasoning ability of LLMs, yet the key design principles and optimal practices remain unclear. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic investigation to demystify reinforcement learning in agentic reasoning from three key perspectives: data, algorithm, and reasoning mode. We highlight our key insights: (i) Replacing stitched synthetic trajectories with real end-to-end tool-use trajectories yields a far stronger SFT initialization; high-diversity, model-aware datasets sustain exploration and markedly improve RL performance. (ii) Exploration-friendly techniques are crucial for agentic RL, such as clip higher, overlong reward shaping, and maintaining adequate policy entropy could improve the training efficiency. (iii) A deliberative strategy with fewer tool calls outperforms frequent tool calls or verbose self-reasoning, improving tool efficiency and final accuracy. Together, these simple practices consistently enhance agentic reasoning and training efficiency, achieving strong results on challenging benchmarks with smaller models, and establishing a practical baseline for future agentic RL research. Beyond these empirical insights, we further contribute a high-quality, real end-to-end agentic SFT dataset along with a high-quality RL dataset, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our insights in boosting the agentic reasoning ability of LLMs across four challenging benchmarks, including AIME2024/AIME2025, GPQA-Diamond, and LiveCodeBench-v6. With our recipes, 4B-sized models could also achieve superior agentic reasoning performance compared to 32B-sized models. Code and models: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/Open-AgentRL

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 13, 2025 2

Model Surgery: Modulating LLM's Behavior Via Simple Parameter Editing

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential as generalist assistants, showcasing powerful task understanding and problem-solving capabilities. To deploy LLMs as AI assistants, it is crucial that these models exhibit desirable behavioral traits, such as non-toxicity and resilience against jailbreak attempts. Current methods for detoxification or preventing jailbreaking usually involve Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which requires finetuning billions of parameters through gradient descent with substantial computation cost. Furthermore, models modified through SFT and RLHF may deviate from the pretrained models, potentially leading to a degradation in foundational LLM capabilities. In this paper, we observe that surprisingly, directly editing a small subset of parameters can effectively modulate specific behaviors of LLMs, such as detoxification and resistance to jailbreaking. Specifically, for a behavior that we aim to avoid, we employ a linear classifier, which we term the behavior probe, to classify binary behavior labels within the hidden state space of the LLM. Using this probe, we introduce an algorithm to identify a critical subset of LLM parameters that significantly influence this targeted behavior. Then we directly edit these selected parameters by shifting them towards the behavior probe. Such a direct parameter editing method necessitates only inference-level computational resources. Experiments demonstrate that in the representative detoxification task, our approach achieves reductions of up to 90.0\% in toxicity on the RealToxicityPrompts dataset and 49.2\% on ToxiGen, while maintaining the LLM's general capabilities in areas such as common sense, question answering, and mathematics. Our code is available at https://github.com/lucywang720/model-surgery.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 11, 2024 4

SFT or RL? An Early Investigation into Training R1-Like Reasoning Large Vision-Language Models

This work revisits the dominant supervised fine-tuning (SFT) then reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm for training Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), and reveals a key finding: SFT can significantly undermine subsequent RL by inducing ``pseudo reasoning paths'' imitated from expert models. While these paths may resemble the native reasoning paths of RL models, they often involve prolonged, hesitant, less informative steps, and incorrect reasoning. To systematically study this effect, we introduce VLAA-Thinking, a new multimodal dataset designed to support reasoning in LVLMs. Constructed via a six-step pipeline involving captioning, reasoning distillation, answer rewrite and verification, VLAA-Thinking comprises high-quality, step-by-step visual reasoning traces for SFT, along with a more challenging RL split from the same data source. Using this dataset, we conduct extensive experiments comparing SFT, RL and their combinations. Results show that while SFT helps models learn reasoning formats, it often locks aligned models into imitative, rigid reasoning modes that impede further learning. In contrast, building on the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a novel mixed reward module integrating both perception and cognition signals, our RL approach fosters more genuine, adaptive reasoning behavior. Notably, our model VLAA-Thinker, based on Qwen2.5VL 3B, achieves top-1 performance on Open LMM Reasoning Leaderboard (https://huggingface.co/spaces/opencompass/Open_LMM_Reasoning_Leaderboard) among 4B scale LVLMs, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by 1.8%. We hope our findings provide valuable insights in developing reasoning-capable LVLMs and can inform future research in this area.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 10, 2025 2

Training Step-Level Reasoning Verifiers with Formal Verification Tools

Process Reward Models (PRMs), which provide step-by-step feedback on the reasoning generated by Large Language Models (LLMs), are receiving increasing attention. However, two key research gaps remain: collecting accurate step-level error labels for training typically requires costly human annotation, and existing PRMs are limited to math reasoning problems. In response to these gaps, this paper aims to address the challenges of automatic dataset creation and the generalization of PRMs to diverse reasoning tasks. To achieve this goal, we propose FoVer, an approach for training PRMs on step-level error labels automatically annotated by formal verification tools, such as Z3 for formal logic and Isabelle for theorem proof, which provide automatic and accurate verification for symbolic tasks. Using this approach, we synthesize a training dataset with error labels on LLM responses for formal logic and theorem proof tasks without human annotation. Although this data synthesis is feasible only for tasks compatible with formal verification, we observe that LLM-based PRMs trained on our dataset exhibit cross-task generalization, improving verification across diverse reasoning tasks. Specifically, PRMs trained with FoVer significantly outperform baseline PRMs based on the original LLMs and achieve competitive or superior results compared to state-of-the-art PRMs trained on labels annotated by humans or stronger models, as measured by step-level verification on ProcessBench and Best-of-K performance across 12 reasoning benchmarks, including MATH, AIME, ANLI, MMLU, and BBH. The datasets, models, and code are provided at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/FoVer.

  • 5 authors
·
May 21, 2025 2

VERGE: Formal Refinement and Guidance Engine for Verifiable LLM Reasoning

Despite the syntactic fluency of Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring their logical correctness in high-stakes domains remains a fundamental challenge. We present a neurosymbolic framework that combines LLMs with SMT solvers to produce verification-guided answers through iterative refinement. Our approach decomposes LLM outputs into atomic claims, autoformalizes them into first-order logic, and verifies their logical consistency using automated theorem proving. We introduce three key innovations: (1) multi-model consensus via formal semantic equivalence checking to ensure logic-level alignment between candidates, eliminating the syntactic bias of surface-form metrics, (2) semantic routing that directs different claim types to appropriate verification strategies: symbolic solvers for logical claims and LLM ensembles for commonsense reasoning, and (3) precise logical error localization via Minimal Correction Subsets (MCS), which pinpoint the exact subset of claims to revise, transforming binary failure signals into actionable feedback. Our framework classifies claims by their logical status and aggregates multiple verification signals into a unified score with variance-based penalty. The system iteratively refines answers using structured feedback until acceptance criteria are met or convergence is achieved. This hybrid approach delivers formal guarantees where possible and consensus verification elsewhere, advancing trustworthy AI. With the GPT-OSS-120B model, VERGE demonstrates an average performance uplift of 18.7% at convergence across a set of reasoning benchmarks compared to single-pass approaches.

ProofBridge: Auto-Formalization of Natural Language Proofs in Lean via Joint Embeddings

Translating human-written mathematical theorems and proofs from natural language (NL) into formal languages (FLs) like Lean 4 has long been a significant challenge for AI. Most state-of-the-art methods address this separately, first translating theorems and then generating proofs, creating a fundamental disconnect vis-a-vis true proof auto-formalization. This two-step process and its limitations were evident even in AlphaProof's silver-medal performance at the 2024 IMO, where problem statements needed manual translation before automated proof synthesis. We present ProofBridge, a unified framework for automatically translating entire NL theorems and proofs into Lean 4. At its core is a joint embedding model that aligns NL and FL (NL-FL) theorem-proof pairs in a shared semantic space, enabling cross-modal retrieval of semantically relevant FL examples to guide translation. Our training ensures that NL-FL theorems (and their proofs) are mapped close together in this space if and only if the NL-FL pairs are semantically equivalent. ProofBridge integrates retrieval-augmented fine-tuning with iterative proof repair, leveraging Lean's type checker and semantic equivalence feedback to ensure both syntactic correctness and semantic fidelity. Experiments show substantial improvements in proof auto-formalization over strong baselines (including GPT-5, Gemini-2.5, Kimina-Prover, DeepSeek-Prover), with our retrieval-augmented approach yielding significant gains in semantic correctness (SC, via proving bi-directional equivalence) and type correctness (TC, via type-checking theorem+proof) across pass@k metrics on miniF2F-Test-PF, a dataset we curated. In particular, ProofBridge improves cross-modal retrieval quality by up to 3.28x Recall@1 over all-MiniLM-L6-v2, and achieves +31.14% SC and +1.64% TC (pass@32) compared to the baseline Kimina-Prover-RL-1.7B.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 17, 2025 1

Autoformalizer with Tool Feedback

Autoformalization addresses the scarcity of data for Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) by translating mathematical problems from natural language into formal statements. Efforts in recent work shift from directly prompting large language models to training an end-to-end formalizer model from scratch, achieving remarkable advancements. However, existing formalizer still struggles to consistently generate valid statements that meet syntactic validity and semantic consistency. To address this issue, we propose the Autoformalizer with Tool Feedback (ATF), a novel approach that incorporates syntactic and consistency information as tools into the formalization process. By integrating Lean 4 compilers for syntax corrections and employing a multi-LLMs-as-judge approach for consistency validation, the model is able to adaptively refine generated statements according to the tool feedback, enhancing both syntactic validity and semantic consistency. The training of ATF involves a cold-start phase on synthetic tool-calling data, an expert iteration phase to improve formalization capabilities, and Direct Preference Optimization to alleviate ineffective revisions. Experimental results show that ATF markedly outperforms a range of baseline formalizer models, with its superior performance further validated by human evaluations. Subsequent analysis reveals that ATF demonstrates excellent inference scaling properties. Moreover, we open-source Numina-ATF, a dataset containing 750K synthetic formal statements to facilitate advancements in autoformalization and ATP research.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 8, 2025

Planning-Driven Programming: A Large Language Model Programming Workflow

The strong performance of large language models (LLMs) on natural language processing tasks raises extensive discussion on their application to code generation. Recent work suggests multiple sampling approaches to improve initial code generation accuracy or program repair approaches to refine the code. However, these methods suffer from LLMs' inefficiencies and limited reasoning capacity. In this work, we propose an LLM programming workflow (LPW) designed to improve both initial code generation and subsequent refinements within a structured two-phase workflow. Specifically, in the solution generation phase, the LLM first outlines a solution plan that decomposes the problem into manageable sub-problems and then verifies the generated solution plan through visible test cases. Subsequently, in the code implementation phase, the LLM initially drafts a code according to the solution plan and its verification. If the generated code fails the visible tests, the plan verification serves as the intended natural language solution to inform the refinement process for correcting bugs. We further introduce SLPW, a sampling variant of LPW, which initially generates multiple solution plans and plan verifications, produces a program for each plan and its verification, and refines each program as necessary until one successfully passes the visible tests. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods across various existing LLMs, our experimental results show that LPW significantly improves the Pass@1 accuracy by up to 16.4% on well-established text-to-code generation benchmarks, especially with a notable improvement of around 10% on challenging benchmarks. Additionally, SLPW demonstrates up to a 5.6% improvement over LPW and sets new state-of-the-art Pass@1 accuracy on various benchmarks, e.g., 98.2% on HumanEval, 84.8% on MBPP, 64.0% on APPS, and 35.3% on CodeContest, using GPT-4o as the backbone.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 21, 2024

ReST-RL: Achieving Accurate Code Reasoning of LLMs with Optimized Self-Training and Decoding

With respect to improving the reasoning accuracy of LLMs, the representative reinforcement learning (RL) method GRPO faces failure due to insignificant reward variance, while verification methods based on process reward models (PRMs) suffer from difficulties with training data acquisition and verification effectiveness. To tackle these problems, this paper introduces ReST-RL, a unified LLM RL paradigm that significantly improves LLM's code reasoning ability by combining an improved GRPO algorithm with a meticulously designed test time decoding method assisted by a value model (VM). As the first stage of policy reinforcement, ReST-GRPO adopts an optimized ReST algorithm to filter and assemble high-value training data, increasing the reward variance of GRPO sampling, thus improving the effectiveness and efficiency of training. After the basic reasoning ability of LLM policy has been improved, we further propose a test time decoding optimization method called VM-MCTS. Through Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), we collect accurate value targets with no annotation required, on which VM training is based. When decoding, the VM is deployed by an adapted MCTS algorithm to provide precise process signals as well as verification scores, assisting the LLM policy to achieve high reasoning accuracy. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed RL paradigm through extensive experiments on coding problems. Upon comparison, our approach significantly outperforms other reinforcement training baselines (e.g., naive GRPO and ReST-DPO), as well as decoding and verification baselines (e.g., PRM-BoN and ORM-MCTS) on well-known coding benchmarks of various levels (e.g., APPS, BigCodeBench, and HumanEval), indicating its power to strengthen the reasoning ability of LLM policies. Codes for our project can be found at https://github.com/THUDM/ReST-RL.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 27, 2025

Process-Supervised Reinforcement Learning for Code Generation

Existing reinforcement learning strategies based on outcome supervision have proven effective in enhancing the performance of large language models(LLMs) for code generation. While reinforcement learning based on process supervision has shown great promise in handling multi-step reasoning tasks, its effectiveness in code generation remains largely underexplored and underjustified. The primary obstacle stems from the resource-intensive nature of constructing high-quality process-supervised data, which demands substantial human expertise and computational resources. In response to this challenge, we propose a "statement mutation/refactoring-compile and execution verification" strategy: mutating and refactoring code line-by-line through a teacher model, and utilizing compiler execution results to automatically label each line, resulting in line-by-line process-supervised data, which is pivotal for training a process-supervised reward model. The trained reward model is then integrated into the PRLCoder framework, followed by experimental validation on several benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that process-supervised reinforcement learning significantly surpasses methods relying solely on outcome supervision. Notably, in tackling complex code generation tasks, process-supervised reinforcement learning shows a clear advantage, ensuring both the integrity of the code generation process and the correctness of the generation results.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 3, 2025

FAIT: Fault-Aware Fine-Tuning for Better Code Generation

Modern instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in code generation. However, these LLMs fine-tuned with standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) sometimes generate plausible-looking but functionally incorrect code variants. This issue likely stems from the limitation of standard SFT, which treats all tokens equally during optimization and fails to emphasize the error-sensitive segments-specific code differences between correct implementations and similar incorrect variants. To address this problem, we propose Fault-Aware Fine-Tuning (FAIT), a novel fine-tuning technique that enhances LLMs' code generation by (1) extracting multi-granularity (line/token-level) differences between correct and incorrect yet similar implementations to identify error-sensitive segments, and (2) dynamically prioritizing those segments during training via dynamic loss weighting. Through extensive experiments on seven LLMs across three widely-used benchmarks, our method achieves an average relative improvement of 6.9% on pass@1 with just one epoch of training, with some enhanced 6.7B LLMs outperforming closed-source models, e.g., GPT-3.5-Turbo. Furthermore, our fine-tuning technique demonstrates strong generalization with performance improvements ranging from 3.8% to 19.1% across diverse instruction-tuned LLMs, and our ablation studies confirm the contributions of different granularities of differences and loss function components.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 21, 2025

Mathematical Proof as a Litmus Test: Revealing Failure Modes of Advanced Large Reasoning Models

Large reasoning models (e.g., R1, o3) have demonstrated remarkable mathematical problem-solving abilities. However, the high reported accuracy of these advanced models on popular datasets, reliance on purely numerical evaluation and potential benchmark leakage, often masks their true reasoning shortcomings. To address this, we propose leveraging the inherent rigor and methodological complexity of mathematical proofs as a diagnostic tool to expose these hidden failures. Specifically, we introduce the RFMDataset (Reveal Failure Modes), a collection of 200 diverse mathematical proof problems, and thoroughly evaluate advanced models' performance on it. Our in-depth analysis of their failures uncovers 10 fine-grained error types, which shows fundamental limitations in current large reasoning models: 1) large reasoning models grapple profoundly with mathematical proofs, with some generating entirely correct proofs for less than 20% of problems and failing even on basic ones; 2) models exhibit a diverse spectrum of reasoning failures, prominently demonstrating the lack of guarantees for the correctness and rigor of single-step reasoning; and 3) models show hallucination and incompleteness during the reasoning process. Our findings reveal that models' self-reflection is insufficient to resolve the current logical dilemmas, necessitating formalized and fine-grained logical training.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 20, 2025

Foundational Automatic Evaluators: Scaling Multi-Task Generative Evaluator Training for Reasoning-Centric Domains

Finetuning specialized generative evaluators has emerged as a popular paradigm to meet the increasing demand for scalable evaluation during both training and test-time. However, recent work has largely focused on applying new methodology, such as reinforcement learning (RL), to training evaluators, shying away from large-scale, data-driven development. In this work, we focus on data scaling, curating a set of 2.5M samples spanning five unique evaluation tasks (pairwise, step-level, reference-free and reference-based verification, and single rating) and multiple domains focused on reasoning evaluation. With our data, we train Foundational Automatic Reasoning Evaluators (FARE), a family of 8B and 20B (with 3.6B active) parameter evaluators, with a simple iterative rejection-sampling supervised finetuning (SFT) approach. FARE-8B challenges larger specialized RL-trained evaluators and FARE-20B sets the new standard for open-source evaluators, surpassing specialized 70B+ evaluators. Beyond static benchmarks, we evaluate FARE in real-world tasks: As inference-time rerankers, FARE-20B achieves near-oracle performance on MATH. As verifiers in RL training, FARE improves the downstream RL-trained model performance by up to 14.1% vs. string-matching verifiers. When initialized from FARE, a continually-finetuned FARE-Code outperforms gpt-oss-20B by 65% on evaluating test-case quality.

Salesforce Salesforce
·
Oct 20, 2025 2

SymRTLO: Enhancing RTL Code Optimization with LLMs and Neuron-Inspired Symbolic Reasoning

Optimizing Register Transfer Level (RTL) code is crucial for improving the power, performance, and area (PPA) of digital circuits in the early stages of synthesis. Manual rewriting, guided by synthesis feedback, can yield high-quality results but is time-consuming and error-prone. Most existing compiler-based approaches have difficulty handling complex design constraints. Large Language Model (LLM)-based methods have emerged as a promising alternative to address these challenges. However, LLM-based approaches often face difficulties in ensuring alignment between the generated code and the provided prompts. This paper presents SymRTLO, a novel neuron-symbolic RTL optimization framework that seamlessly integrates LLM-based code rewriting with symbolic reasoning techniques. Our method incorporates a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system of optimization rules and Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)-based templates, enabling LLM-based rewriting that maintains syntactic correctness while minimizing undesired circuit behaviors. A symbolic module is proposed for analyzing and optimizing finite state machine (FSM) logic, allowing fine-grained state merging and partial specification handling beyond the scope of pattern-based compilers. Furthermore, a fast verification pipeline, combining formal equivalence checks with test-driven validation, further reduces the complexity of verification. Experiments on the RTL-Rewriter benchmark with Synopsys Design Compiler and Yosys show that SymRTLO improves power, performance, and area (PPA) by up to 43.9%, 62.5%, and 51.1%, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

  • 15 authors
·
Apr 14, 2025

Re:Form -- Reducing Human Priors in Scalable Formal Software Verification with RL in LLMs: A Preliminary Study on Dafny

Existing informal language-based (e.g., human language) Large Language Models (LLMs) trained with Reinforcement Learning (RL) face a significant challenge: their verification processes, which provide crucial training signals, are neither reliable nor scalable. In fact, the prevalent large proprietary models could hardly generate verifiable programs. A promising yet largely uncharted alternative is formal language-based reasoning. Grounding LLMs in rigorous formal systems where generative models operate in formal language spaces (e.g., Dafny) enables the automatic and mathematically provable verification of their reasoning processes and outcomes. This capability is pivotal for achieving large-scale, reliable formal software verification. It is a common practice to employ human-annotated chain-of-thought and other human priors to induce the reasoning and coding capabilities of LLMs. Unfortunately, it becomes unacceptably all-consuming to provide such priors for supervising complex programming tasks. In this work, we systematically explore ways to reduce human priors with the formal language, Dafny, as the main environment for our pilot study. Our pipeline mainly relies on introducing an automatic and scalable data curation pipeline, and careful RL designs integrated with feedback from the formal language verifier. We introduce DafnyComp, a benchmark of compositional formal programs with auto-formalized specifications for specification reasoning. Our supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage enables even small models (e.g., 0.5B) to generate syntactically valid and verifiable Dafny code, surpassing proprietary models. RL with regularization further improves performance, achieving stronger generalization to out-of-domain tasks and outperforming all strong baselines on the challenging DafnyComp benchmark.

  • 16 authors
·
Jul 22, 2025 1

Structured Prompting and Feedback-Guided Reasoning with LLMs for Data Interpretation

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and task generalization. However, their application to structured data analysis remains fragile due to inconsistencies in schema interpretation, misalignment between user intent and model output, and limited mechanisms for self-correction when failures occur. This paper introduces the STROT Framework (Structured Task Reasoning and Output Transformation), a method for structured prompting and feedback-driven transformation logic generation aimed at improving the reliability and semantic alignment of LLM-based analytical workflows. STROT begins with lightweight schema introspection and sample-based field classification, enabling dynamic context construction that captures both the structure and statistical profile of the input data. This contextual information is embedded in structured prompts that guide the model toward generating task-specific, interpretable outputs. To address common failure modes in complex queries, STROT incorporates a refinement mechanism in which the model iteratively revises its outputs based on execution feedback and validation signals. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on static prompts or single-shot inference, STROT treats the LLM as a reasoning agent embedded within a controlled analysis loop -- capable of adjusting its output trajectory through planning and correction. The result is a robust and reproducible framework for reasoning over structured data with LLMs, applicable to diverse data exploration and analysis tasks where interpretability, stability, and correctness are essential.

  • 1 authors
·
May 2, 2025

Mutual-Supervised Learning for Sequential-to-Parallel Code Translation

The rise of GPU-based high-performance computing (HPC) has driven the widespread adoption of parallel programming models such as CUDA. Yet, the inherent complexity of parallel programming creates a demand for the automated sequential-to-parallel approaches. However, data scarcity poses a significant challenge for machine learning-based sequential-to-parallel code translation. Although recent back-translation methods show promise, they still fail to ensure functional equivalence in the translated code. In this paper, we propose a novel Mutual-Supervised Learning (MSL) framework for sequential-to-parallel code translation to address the functional equivalence issue. MSL consists of two models, a Translator and a Tester. Through an iterative loop consisting of Co-verify and Co-evolve steps, the Translator and the Tester mutually generate data for each other and improve collectively. The Tester generates unit tests to verify and filter functionally equivalent translated code, thereby evolving the Translator, while the Translator generates translated code as augmented input to evolve the Tester. Experimental results demonstrate that MuSL significantly enhances the performance of the base model: when applied to Qwen2.5-Coder, it not only improves Pass@1 by up to 28.91% and boosts Tester performance by 68.90%, but also outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method CodeRosetta by 1.56 and 6.92 in BLEU and CodeBLEU scores, while achieving performance comparable to DeepSeek-R1 and GPT-4.1. Our code is available at https://github.com/kcxain/musl.

  • 14 authors
·
Jun 11, 2025

Jet-RL: Enabling On-Policy FP8 Reinforcement Learning with Unified Training and Rollout Precision Flow

Reinforcement learning (RL) is essential for enhancing the complex reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing RL training pipelines are computationally inefficient and resource-intensive, with the rollout phase accounting for over 70% of total training time. Quantized RL training, particularly using FP8 precision, offers a promising approach to mitigating this bottleneck. A commonly adopted strategy applies FP8 precision during rollout while retaining BF16 precision for training. In this work, we present the first comprehensive study of FP8 RL training and demonstrate that the widely used BF16-training + FP8-rollout strategy suffers from severe training instability and catastrophic accuracy collapse under long-horizon rollouts and challenging tasks. Our analysis shows that these failures stem from the off-policy nature of the approach, which introduces substantial numerical mismatch between training and inference. Motivated by these observations, we propose Jet-RL, an FP8 RL training framework that enables robust and stable RL optimization. The key idea is to adopt a unified FP8 precision flow for both training and rollout, thereby minimizing numerical discrepancies and eliminating the need for inefficient inter-step calibration. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of Jet-RL: our method achieves up to 33% speedup in the rollout phase, up to 41% speedup in the training phase, and a 16% end-to-end speedup over BF16 training, while maintaining stable convergence across all settings and incurring negligible accuracy degradation.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Jan 20 3

Anchored Supervised Fine-Tuning

Post-training of large language models involves a fundamental trade-off between supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which efficiently mimics demonstrations but tends to memorize, and reinforcement learning (RL), which achieves better generalization at higher computational cost. Dynamic Fine-Tuning (DFT) recently emerged as a promising middle ground, reweighting SFT objectives with token probabilities and achieving improvements in certain reasoning domains, though it exhibits instability in other tasks. We provide a analysis of DFT through the reward-weighted regression (RWR) framework, revealing that it corresponds to a specific auxiliary distribution choice that yields provably tighter RL bounds than standard SFT. However, our analysis also uncovers a critical limitation: this construction lacks distributional anchoring, leading to progressive drift that undermines training stability. To address this, we propose Anchored Supervised Fine-Tuning (ASFT), which augments DFT's reweighting with lightweight KL regularization to preserve tightness while ensuring stability. Empirically, ASFT consistently outperforms both SFT and DFT across mathematical reasoning, medical knowledge grounding, and code generation, achieving substantial improvements with minimal computational overhead. Our RWR framework provides a systematic lens for understanding post-training methods and demonstrates that principled theoretical analysis leads to both stronger guarantees and practical gains.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 28, 2025

Parallel-R1: Towards Parallel Thinking via Reinforcement Learning

Parallel thinking has emerged as a novel approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by exploring multiple reasoning paths concurrently. However, activating such capabilities through training remains challenging, as existing methods predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) over synthetic data, which encourages teacher-forced imitation rather than exploration and generalization. Different from them, we propose Parallel-R1, the first reinforcement learning (RL) framework that enables parallel thinking behaviors for complex real-world reasoning tasks. Our framework employs a progressive curriculum that explicitly addresses the cold-start problem in training parallel thinking with RL. We first use SFT on prompt-generated trajectories from easier tasks to instill the parallel thinking ability, then transition to RL to explore and generalize this skill on harder problems. Experiments on various math benchmarks, including MATH, AMC23, and AIME, show that Parallel-R1 successfully instills parallel thinking, leading to 8.4% accuracy improvements over the sequential thinking model trained directly on challenging tasks with RL. Further analysis reveals a clear shift in the model's thinking behavior: at an early stage, it uses parallel thinking as an exploration strategy, while in a later stage, it uses the same capability for multi-perspective verification. Most significantly, we validate parallel thinking as a mid-training exploration scaffold, where this temporary exploratory phase unlocks a higher performance ceiling after RL, yielding a 42.9% improvement over the baseline on AIME25. Our model, data, and code will be open-source at https://github.com/zhengkid/Parallel-R1.

tencent Tencent
·
Sep 9, 2025 3

AMFT: Aligning LLM Reasoners by Meta-Learning the Optimal Imitation-Exploration Balance

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically fine-tuned for reasoning tasks through a two-stage pipeline of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL), a process fraught with catastrophic forgetting and suboptimal trade-offs between imitation and exploration. Recent single-stage methods attempt to unify SFT and RL using heuristics, but lack a principled mechanism for dynamically balancing the two paradigms. In this paper, we reframe this challenge through the theoretical lens of implicit rewards, viewing SFT and RL not as distinct methods but as complementary reward signals. We introduce Adaptive Meta Fine-Tuning (AMFT), a novel single-stage algorithm that learns the optimal balance between SFT's implicit, path-level reward and RL's explicit, outcome-based reward. The core of AMFT is a meta-gradient adaptive weight controller that treats the SFT-RL balance as a learnable parameter, dynamically optimizing it to maximize long-term task performance. This forward-looking approach, regularized by policy entropy for stability, autonomously discovers an effective training curriculum. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation on challenging benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, abstract visual reasoning (General Points), and vision-language navigation (V-IRL). AMFT consistently establishes a new state-of-the-art and demonstrats superior generalization on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks. Ablation studies and training dynamic analysis confirm that the meta-learning controller is crucial for AMFT's stability, sample efficiency, and performance, offering a more principled and effective paradigm for LLM alignment.Our codes are open-sourced via https://github.com/hlxtsyj/AMFT.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 9, 2025 2

FVEL: Interactive Formal Verification Environment with Large Language Models via Theorem Proving

Formal verification (FV) has witnessed growing significance with current emerging program synthesis by the evolving large language models (LLMs). However, current formal verification mainly resorts to symbolic verifiers or hand-craft rules, resulting in limitations for extensive and flexible verification. On the other hand, formal languages for automated theorem proving, such as Isabelle, as another line of rigorous verification, are maintained with comprehensive rules and theorems. In this paper, we propose FVEL, an interactive Formal Verification Environment with LLMs. Specifically, FVEL transforms a given code to be verified into Isabelle, and then conducts verification via neural automated theorem proving with an LLM. The joined paradigm leverages the rigorous yet abundant formulated and organized rules in Isabelle and is also convenient for introducing and adjusting cutting-edge LLMs. To achieve this goal, we extract a large-scale FVELER3. The FVELER dataset includes code dependencies and verification processes that are formulated in Isabelle, containing 758 theories, 29,125 lemmas, and 200,646 proof steps in total with in-depth dependencies. We benchmark FVELER in the FVEL environment by first fine-tuning LLMs with FVELER and then evaluating them on Code2Inv and SV-COMP. The results show that FVEL with FVELER fine-tuned Llama3- 8B solves 17.39% (69 -> 81) more problems, and Mistral-7B 12% (75 -> 84) more problems in SV-COMP. And the proportion of proof errors is reduced. Project page: https://fveler.github.io/.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 20, 2024

130k Lines of Formal Topology in Two Weeks: Simple and Cheap Autoformalization for Everyone?

This is a brief description of a project that has already autoformalized a large portion of the general topology from the Munkres textbook (which has in total 241 pages in 7 chapters and 39 sections). The project has been running since November 21, 2025 and has as of January 4, 2026, produced 160k lines of formalized topology. Most of it (about 130k lines) have been done in two weeks,from December 22 to January 4, for an LLM subscription cost of about \$100. This includes a 3k-line proof of Urysohn's lemma, a 2k-line proof of Urysohn's Metrization theorem, over 10k-line proof of the Tietze extension theorem, and many more (in total over 1.5k lemmas/theorems). The approach is quite simple and cheap: build a long-running feedback loop between an LLM and a reasonably fast proof checker equipped with a core foundational library. The LLM is now instantiated as ChatGPT (mostly 5.2) or Claude Sonnet (4.5) run through the respective Codex or Claude Code command line interfaces. The proof checker is Chad Brown's higher-order set theory system Megalodon, and the core library is Brown's formalization of basic set theory and surreal numbers (including reals, etc). The rest is some prompt engineering and technical choices which we describe here. Based on the fast progress, low cost, virtually unknown ITP/library, and the simple setup available to everyone, we believe that (auto)formalization may become quite easy and ubiquitous in 2026, regardless of which proof assistant is used.

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 5

SWE-RL: Advancing LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning on Open Software Evolution

The recent DeepSeek-R1 release has demonstrated the immense potential of reinforcement learning (RL) in enhancing the general reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While DeepSeek-R1 and other follow-up work primarily focus on applying RL to competitive coding and math problems, this paper introduces SWE-RL, the first approach to scale RL-based LLM reasoning for real-world software engineering. Leveraging a lightweight rule-based reward (e.g., the similarity score between ground-truth and LLM-generated solutions), SWE-RL enables LLMs to autonomously recover a developer's reasoning processes and solutions by learning from extensive open-source software evolution data -- the record of a software's entire lifecycle, including its code snapshots, code changes, and events such as issues and pull requests. Trained on top of Llama 3, our resulting reasoning model, Llama3-SWE-RL-70B, achieves a 41.0% solve rate on SWE-bench Verified -- a human-verified collection of real-world GitHub issues. To our knowledge, this is the best performance reported for medium-sized (<100B) LLMs to date, even comparable to leading proprietary LLMs like GPT-4o. Surprisingly, despite performing RL solely on software evolution data, Llama3-SWE-RL has even emerged with generalized reasoning skills. For example, it shows improved results on five out-of-domain tasks, namely, function coding, library use, code reasoning, mathematics, and general language understanding, whereas a supervised-finetuning baseline even leads to performance degradation on average. Overall, SWE-RL opens up a new direction to improve the reasoning capabilities of LLMs through reinforcement learning on massive software engineering data.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 25, 2025 5

Spark-Prover-X1: Formal Theorem Proving Through Diverse Data Training

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant promise in automated theorem proving, yet progress is often constrained by the scarcity of diverse and high-quality formal language data. To address this issue, we introduce Spark-Prover-X1, a 7B parameter model trained via an three-stage framework designed to unlock the reasoning potential of more accessible and moderately-sized LLMs. The first stage infuses deep knowledge through continuous pre-training on a broad mathematical corpus, enhanced by a suite of novel data tasks. Key innovation is a "CoT-augmented state prediction" task to achieve fine-grained reasoning. The second stage employs Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) within an expert iteration loop to specialize both the Spark-Prover-X1-7B and Spark-Formalizer-X1-7B models. Finally, a targeted round of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is applied to sharpen the prover's capabilities on the most challenging problems. To facilitate robust evaluation, particularly on problems from real-world examinations, we also introduce ExamFormal-Bench, a new benchmark dataset of 402 formal problems. Experimental results demonstrate that Spark-Prover achieves state-of-the-art performance among similarly-sized open-source models within the "Whole-Proof Generation" paradigm. It shows exceptional performance on difficult competition benchmarks, notably solving 27 problems on PutnamBench (pass@32) and achieving 24.0\% on CombiBench (pass@32). Our work validates that this diverse training data and progressively refined training pipeline provides an effective path for enhancing the formal reasoning capabilities of lightweight LLMs. We will release both Spark-Prover-X1-7B and Spark-Formalizer-X1-7B, along with the ExamFormal-Bench dataset, in the near future.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 17, 2025

A Theoretical Study on Bridging Internal Probability and Self-Consistency for LLM Reasoning

Test-time scaling seeks to improve the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by adding computational resources. A prevalent approach within the field is sampling-based test-time scaling methods, which enhance reasoning by generating multiple reasoning paths for a given input during inference. However, despite its practical success, the theoretical foundations remain underexplored. In this paper, we provide the first theoretical framework for analyzing sampling-based test-time scaling methods, grounded in the perspective of confidence estimation. Based on the framework, we analyze two dominant paradigms: self-consistency and perplexity, and reveal key limitations: self-consistency suffers from high estimation error while perplexity exhibits substantial modeling error and possible degradation of the estimation error convergence. To address these limitations, we introduce RPC, a hybrid method that leverages our theoretical insights through two key components: Perplexity Consistency and Reasoning Pruning. Perplexity Consistency combines the strengths of self-consistency and perplexity, boosting the convergence rate of estimation error from linear to exponential while preserving model error. Reasoning Pruning prevents degradation by eliminating low-probability reasoning paths. Both theoretical analysis and empirical results across seven benchmark datasets demonstrate that RPC has a strong potential for reducing reasoning error. Notably, RPC achieves reasoning performance comparable to self-consistency while not only enhancing confidence reliability but also reducing sampling costs by 50%. The code and resources are available at https://wnjxyk.github.io/RPC.

LAMDA-NeSy NJU-IRP
·
Oct 17, 2025 7

Harnessing the Power of Large Language Models for Natural Language to First-Order Logic Translation

Translating natural language sentences to first-order logic (NL-FOL translation) is a longstanding challenge in the NLP and formal logic literature. This paper introduces LogicLLaMA, a LLaMA-7B model fine-tuned for NL-FOL translation using LoRA on a single GPU. LogicLLaMA is capable of directly translating natural language into FOL rules, which outperforms GPT-3.5. LogicLLaMA is also equipped to correct FOL rules predicted by GPT-3.5, and can achieve similar performance as GPT-4 with a fraction of the cost. This correction ability was achieved by a novel supervised fine-tuning (SFT) + reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) framework, which initially trains on synthetically perturbed NL-FOL pairs to encourage chain-of-thought reasoning and then fine-tunes with RLHF on GPT-3.5 outputs using a FOL verifier as the reward model. To train LogicLLaMA, we present MALLS (large language Model generAted NL-FOL pairS), a dataset of 34K high-quality and diverse sentence-level NL-FOL pairs collected from GPT-4. The dataset was created by implementing a pipeline that prompts GPT-4 for pairs, and dynamically adjusts the prompts to ensure the collection of pairs with rich and diverse contexts at different levels of complexity, and verifies the validity of the generated FOL rules. Codes, weights, and data are available at https://github.com/gblackout/LogicLLaMA{{small https://github.com/gblackout/LogicLLaMA}}.

  • 5 authors
·
May 24, 2023

VeriCoder: Enhancing LLM-Based RTL Code Generation through Functional Correctness Validation

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in applying them to Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tasks, particularly Register Transfer Level (RTL) code generation. While several RTL datasets have been introduced, most focus on syntactic validity rather than functional validation with tests, leading to training examples that compile but may not implement the intended behavior. We present VERICODER, a model for RTL code generation fine-tuned on a dataset validated for functional correctness. This fine-tuning dataset is constructed using a novel methodology that combines unit test generation with feedback-directed refinement. Given a natural language specification and an initial RTL design, we prompt a teacher model (GPT-4o-mini) to generate unit tests and iteratively revise the RTL design based on its simulation results using the generated tests. If necessary, the teacher model also updates the tests to ensure they comply with the natural language specification. As a result of this process, every example in our dataset is functionally validated, consisting of a natural language description, an RTL implementation, and passing tests. Fine-tuned on this dataset of over 125,000 examples, VERICODER achieves state-of-the-art metrics in functional correctness on VerilogEval and RTLLM, with relative gains of up to 71.7% and 27.4% respectively. An ablation study further shows that models trained on our functionally validated dataset outperform those trained on functionally non-validated datasets, underscoring the importance of high-quality datasets in RTL code generation.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 22, 2025