Challenge: Long-CoT reasoning and reinforcement learning are demonstrating remarkable performance and scalability, however, there is a lack of systematic guidelines for obtaining a better initial policy model.
Approach: They propose a systematic guideline and a novel Re-RFT method to obtain more efficient reasoning patterns from different initial models.
Outcome: The proposed method surpasses DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B model by 4.6%, demonstrating its effectiveness and superiority.

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One Missing Piece for Open-Source Reasoning Models: A Dataset to Mitigate Cold-Starting Short CoT LLMs in RL (2025.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Existing large reasoning models are limited by their closed nature and high API costs and safety issues.
Approach: They propose to build a long CoT dataset with existing short CoT LLMs that are not trained for inference-time scaling.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves quality comparable to—or slightly below—R1 and is able to think longer and provide control over the thought budget to better manage the overthinking problem.
A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models under Data Scarcity: Challenges and Solutions (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing research on reinforcement learning for LLMs under data scarcity has not been unified.
Approach: They propose a top-up hierarchical framework built around three complementary perspectives: data-centric, training-centric and framework-centric.
Outcome: The proposed framework provides a clear conceptual foundation for understanding the design space of data-efficient RL for large language models and to guide researchers working in this emerging area.
LEPO: Latent Reasoning Policy Optimization for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing latent reasoning methods that use chain of thought (CoT) are limited to selecting one discrete token at each reasoning step, which potentially induces information loss.
Approach: They propose a framework that injects controllable stochasticity into latent reasoning via Gumbel-Softmax, restoring LLMs' exploratory capacity and enhancing their compatibility with Reinforcement Learning (RL).
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Not All Tokens Matter: Towards Efficient LLM Reasoning via Token Significance in Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) often produce unnecessarily long explanations that reduce efficiency.
Approach: They propose a length-aware reward that selectively penalizes insignificance tokens . they also propose 'dynamic length control' that encourages more detailed reasoning .
Outcome: The proposed method reduces response length while maintaining correctness, the authors show . it selectively penalizes insignificance tokens while maintaining accuracy .
Tailored Primitive Initialization is the Secret Key to Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models.
Approach: They propose a pipeline that automatically discovers thinking token patterns with reasoning primitives and curates SFT datasets to prepare LLMs for RL.
Outcome: The proposed pipeline outperforms baseline methods on mathematical and logical reasoning benchmarks on RL tasks.
Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent progress in large language models is driven by scaling of training compute through pre-training with nexttoken prediction (NTP) or post-training (RL) Pre-training using NTP enables models to acquire extensive knowledge and skills from general data, but it suffers from data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings.
Approach: They propose to scale training compute through pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training by scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to improve learning from general data.
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Through the Valley: Path to Effective Long CoT Training for Small Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision is effective for large language models . but small models trained on limited long CoT data experience performance degradation .
Approach: They identify a phenomenon called Long CoT Degradation in small language models . long CoT data can be used to generate long chain-of-thought (CoT) responses .
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MTP-RL: Acceleration of Reinforcement Learning Rollouts with Policy-Aligned Multi-Token Prediction (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely applied to boost the performance of pretrained models, yet its training efficiency is severely constrained by rollout generation.
Approach: They propose a framework that accelerates the rollout phase for diverse models by equipping a pipeline to equip the multi-layer parameter-sharing MTP for all models and an advantage-aware MTP optimization strategy.
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Reader: Model-based language-instructed reinforcement learning (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing models of RL are limited and need to be re-trained for every new problem.
Approach: They propose a model-based reinforcement learning approach to tackle the environment Read To Fight Monsters, a grounded policy learning problem.
Outcome: The proposed approach performs better than existing model-free SOTA agents in the read to fight monsters environment and is more sample efficient than existing models.
Reinforcement Learning for Aligning Large Language Models Agents with Interactive Environments: Quantifying and Mitigating Prompt Overfitting (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for aligning large language models knowledge with sequential decision-making tasks.
Approach: They propose to use a contrastive loss framework to analyze the sensitivity of LLMs to prompt formulations following RL training in a textual environment.
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