Papers with RL algorithms
Act as you think: Reinforcing Consistent Reasoning in Medical Visual Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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Songtao Jiang, Yuan Wang, Ruizhe Chen, Yan Zhang, Ruilin Luo, Bohan Lei, Yeying Jin, Sibo Song, ZhiBo Yang, Jimeng Sun, Jian Wu, Zuozhu Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances have improved the accuracy of medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) however, the high stakes nature of the medical domain has precipitated a shift towards interpretability and transparency of reasoning processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards framework that rewards internal consistency and logical coherence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework rewards internal consistency and logical coherence, and is highly versatile, the authors show. |
Feedback-Driven Tool-Use Improvements in Large Language Models via Automated Build Environments (2026.findings-acl)
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Junjie Ye, Changhao Jiang, Zhengyin Du, Yufei Xu, Xuesong Yao, Zhiheng Xi, Xiaoran Fan, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang, Jiecao Chen
| Challenge: | Currently, there are no efficient reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks specifically designed for tool use. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated environment construction pipeline that incorporates scenario decomposition, document generation, function integration, complexity scaling, and localized deployment to enable high-quality training environments without external tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves the models’ tool-use performance without degrading their general capabilities. |
Feudal Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Management in Large Domains (N18-2)
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Iñigo Casanueva, Paweł Budzianowski, Pei-Hao Su, Stefan Ultes, Lina M. Rojas-Barahona, Bo-Hsiang Tseng, Milica Gašić
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach to model dialogue policy optimisation but fails to scale to large domains due to the curse of dimensionality. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to dialogue policy optimisation using reinforcement learning . they propose to decompose the decision into two steps using a domain ontology . |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms state-of-the-art in several dialogue domains without any additional reward signal. |
CODERL+: Improving Code Generation via Reinforcement with Execution Semantics Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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Xue Jiang, Yihong Dong, Mengyang Liu, Deng Hongyi, Tian Wang, Yongding Tao, Zhi Jin, Wenpin Jiao, Ge Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models excel at code generation by learning from vast code corpora, but a fundamental semantic gap remains between training on textual patterns and the goal of functional correctness . reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) approaches are inefficient for establishing a well-aligned connection between the textual representation of code and its execution semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that integrates execution semantics alignment into the RLVR training pipeline for code generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline training and RLVR and shows strong applicability across RL and LLMs. |
Controlling Multimodal Conversational Agents with Coverage-Enhanced Latent Actions (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely explored for adapting MCAs to various human-AI interaction scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a latent action space for reinforcement learning instead of RL to fine-tune MCAs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on two conversation tasks with a novel cycle consistency loss. |
Boundary-Guided Policy Optimization for Memory-efficient RL of Diffusion Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for reinforcement learning (RL) require a large sample size to be implemented. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-efficient RL algorithm that maximizes a lower bound of the ELBO-based objective. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that BGPO outperforms previous RL algorithms for diffusion large language models in math problem solving, code generation, and planning tasks. |
STEER: Unified Style Transfer with Expert Reinforcement (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show unified style transfer models outperform the 175B instruction-tuned GPT-3 on overall style transfer quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified style transfer framework that can transfer to multiple target styles from an arbitrary source style. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the 175B instruction-tuned GPT-3 on overall style transfer quality despite being 226 times smaller in size . |
Efficient (Soft) Q-Learning for Text Generation with Limited Good Data (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is the predominant method for training text generation models. |
| Approach: | They propose a new RL formulation for text generation from the soft Q-learning perspective using path consistency learning to combine the best of on-/off-policy updates and learn effectively from sparse reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms MLE and previous RL methods in a wide range of tasks. |
Android Coach: Improve Online Agentic Training Efficiency with Single State Multiple Actions (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reinforcement learning methods are expensive due to high latency and sample inefficiency . Currently, RL is limited to one-to-one state-action pairs . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that shifts the training paradigm to Single State Multiple Actions and introduce a group-wise advantage estimator based on the averaged critic outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 7.5% and 8.3% success rate improvements on AndroidLab and AndroidWorld over UI-TARS-1.5-7B and attains 1.4x higher training efficiency than existing methods. |
Semantic-Space Exploration and Exploitation in RLVR for LLM Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Fanding Huang, Guanbo Huang, Xiao Fan, Yi He, Xiao Liang, Xiao Chen, Qinting Jiang, Faisal Nadeem Khan, Jingyan Jiang, Zhi Wang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have substantially improved the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that balances exploration and exploitation in the hidden-state space of response trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model yields consistent improvements across models, algorithms and reasoning benchmarks. |
WebAnchor: Anchoring Agent Planning to Stabilize Long-Horizon Web Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for reinforcement learning (RL)-based agents struggle with long-horizon planning and strategy coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that decouples planning and execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline and first-step RL frameworks on four benchmarks. |
Influence-based Online Experience Selection for Effective RLHF (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for RL fail to establish an interpretable connection between data and optimization objectives. |
| Approach: | They propose a data selection method that dynamically estimates the influence of individual training samples on policy optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves training effectiveness with fewer optimization steps. |