Search: “online-learning”

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Not All Prompts Are Equal: Exploration-Guided Prompt Scaffolding for Multimodal Reinforcement Post-Training

Exploration-guided prompt scaffolding rewrites training prompts by Exploration Potential Score, boosting multimodal RL post-training accuracy up to 11.5%.

The paper proposes dynamically adapting the training prompt distribution during online RL post-training of multimodal LLMs using the Exploration Potential Score (EPS), a lightweight rollout-based proxy for prompt utility computed from on-policy statistics with no additional overhead. Rather than discarding low-utility prompts, a teacher model generates scaffolded rewrites that preserve task intent while making training more informative. Integrated with GRPO on Geo3K and MMK12, the method achieves up to 9.7% relative in-domain improvement plus 11.5% on MathVision and 11.1% on MMMU-Pro.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 13, 20:00 UTC · 3d agoAI research

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Learning never stops: How AI makes learning continuous

OpenAI report describes how students and educators use ChatGPT to extend learning continuously beyond the classroom.

OpenAI published a report examining how students and educators use ChatGPT to make learning more continuous. The report describes support that extends beyond the classroom, positioning ChatGPT as an ongoing learning companion. The release is part of OpenAI's education-focused communications rather than a technical or safety research paper.

OpenAI News·Aug 26, 10:00 UTC · 21d agoAI industry

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Online Learning with LLM Experts from Limited Feedback

Paper proposes bandit algorithms for adaptively routing prompts to LLM experts, minimizing regret under limited feedback budgets.

The paper formulates adaptive prompt routing to K LLM experts as a contextual bandit problem with d prompt features over T rounds. Proposed algorithms strategically select actions and observe rewards, achieving O(dT/m) regret in the full-information setting and O(dTK/m) in the bandit setting, where m is the feedback budget. Experiments demonstrate efficient learning of high-quality routing strategies across diverse LLMs from limited feedback.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 4, 20:00 UTC · 12d agoAI research

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Distill Globally, Adapt Locally: Reasoning Distillation and Product-Type Test-Time Training for Scalable Trade-Up Recommendation

A distillation framework compresses LLM reasoning into a 15.5M-parameter trade-up recommendation model reaching AUC 0.941 with product-type test-time training.

The paper targets trade-up recommendation, which identifies higher-quality alternatives that preserve customer purchase intent. A retrieval-augmented few-shot LLM teacher generates labels and rationales that supervise a compact embedding-pair classifier; at inference the 15.5M-parameter student uses only two precomputed 768-dimensional embeddings with no LLM calls. On 8,352 annotated pairs, label-only training scored AUC 0.912, reasoning distillation reached 0.924, and product-type test-time training lifted it to 0.941 with average precision 0.940. The distilled student is roughly 5,000x faster and 10,000x cheaper than direct LLM inference on a 100K-pair proxy catalog.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 17:08 UTC · 12d agoAI research

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Learning to Coach for Experiential Learning

Learning to Coach trains a dedicated LLM coach to extract transferable experiential knowledge from a frozen actor's trajectories, beating self-refinement.

Learning to Coach (L2C) trains an LLM-as-a-Coach to extract actionable experiential knowledge from a frozen actor model's previous solution trajectories, optimizing rewards based on the actor's guided response correctness. It studies same-instance and cross-instance rewards, where cross-instance elicits knowledge that transfers to other problems. Across mathematical reasoning and interactive text-games, L2C outperforms self-refinement and untrained coaches, scales better with extra inference iterations than larger decoding budgets, and transfers to out-of-distribution tasks.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 14, 16:47 UTC · 2d agoAI research1

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NeoHorse-1: Towards Recursive Self-Improvement via Agentic Post-Training with Routing Harness

NeoHorse-1 introduces agentic post-training with intelligent routing that lifts agent benchmark scores at 4B and 9B scales, prototyping recursive self-improvement.

NeoHorse-1 is a family of agent-native models trained through agentic post-training: routing-harness logs (predicted capability demand, service tier, interaction) become structurally validated training data organized into a three-stage SFT curriculum plus routing-guided on-policy distillation. Capability-guided allocation converts evaluation feedback into the next training mixture, closing an evaluation-selection-update loop. Post-training raises the macro-average from 58.94 to 64.87 at 4B and from 65.60 to 69.04 at 9B across eleven agent, tool-use, coding, and instruction-following benchmarks. The authors position it as a prototype of harness-mediated recursive self-improvement.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoAI research1

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Coupled Calibration and Learning: Mitigating Teacher Bias in LLM Distillation without Target-Domain Reward Feedback

CCL couples teacher calibration with student updates via token-level branching, provably removing teacher bias in LLM distillation.

The paper proposes Coupled Calibration and Learning (CCL), an LLM distillation algorithm that alternates teacher calibration using source-question reward feedback with student training on target questions under covariate shift. Each iteration calibrates the teacher on source feedback, trains the student on target questions, and lets the updated student inform subsequent calibration. The authors prove the student's expected KL divergence to the oracle student converges to zero at a polynomial rate, and show regularized direct matching error can remain bounded away from zero.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 15, 17:15 UTC · 1d agoAI research1

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Online Draft Co-Training for Speculative Decoding in Large-Scale, Long-Context RL Post-Training

NVIDIA researchers detail an end-to-end system for online draft co-training that speeds speculative decoding in large-scale long-context RL post-training.

The paper tackles scaling online draft co-training for speculative decoding in RL post-training, where rollout generation dominates cost. It extends packed, load-balanced zigzag ring attention to merge rank-local branch attention with causal main-sequence attention for context parallelism, and introduces TapChannel to transport target features across pipeline-parallel stages without changing the schedule. Experiments show co-trained drafts tracking the policy baseline with substantial rollout and end-to-end speedups up to 122B parameters and strong scaling at 256K tokens.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research1

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I wrote an AI textbook — how long until AI can do it better?

AI researcher Nathan Lambert argues LLMs remain weak at long-form technical writing, questioning whether models can autonomously organize scientific knowledge for breakthroughs.

Nathan Lambert describes writing a post-training textbook, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, and finds today's LLMs weak at organizing long-form technical content despite becoming superhuman at coding and math. He notes GPT 5.5 Pro found deep typos across a 200-300 page manuscript while Claude models proved more useful as editors. He argues that compressing knowledge through writing is a prerequisite for autonomous scientific insight and tempers expectations for near-term AI-driven open science.

Interconnects·Aug 12, 13:01 UTC · Aug 12, 2026AI research

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Who Should Grade My Work? Student Perspectives on Transparent AI-Assisted Writing Assessment in Higher Education

A Saudi university study finds students value ChatGPT writing feedback but treat human instructors as the final grading authority.

Thirteen male undergraduate computing students at a Saudi public university completed handwritten writing tasks that were scored by ChatGPT using a rubric-based prompt, then reflected after being told the score and feedback were AI-generated. Inductive thematic analysis identified four themes: perceived feedback usefulness, awareness of AI's contextual and pedagogical limitations, conditional trust, and reflection on the instructor's institutional role. Participants accepted GenAI feedback for surface-level revision but consistently positioned human instructors as the authority over grading decisions, distinguishing feedback utility from evaluative authority.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 16:49 UTC · 12d agoAI research

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Transfer Learning for Evolving Domains

TrED formalizes transfer learning for domains whose data availability evolves over time, arguing classical settings are regimes along one trajectory, and remains unsolved.

The paper introduces Transfer Learning for Evolving Domains (TrED), formalizing transfer learning as a trajectory problem where target data and labels are progressively collected. TrED is specified by a data availability process fixed by the environment, a freely chosen learning protocol, and an evaluation criterion scoring the whole trajectory of models. Classical settings like domain generalization, domain adaptation, and multi-domain learning are recovered as regimes within this framework. The authors survey the literature and find most methods are tailored to a single regime, leaving TrED a well-posed open problem.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 11, 16:37 UTC · 5d agoAI research

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Continual Learning Mechanisms Compose for Long-Horizon Memorization

Composing data, function, and weight anchors with merged LoRA raises 100-task long-horizon retention from 1.2% to 34.9% in continual fine-tuning.

The paper introduces long-horizon memorization: a model learns 100 query-answer tasks through continual supervised fine-tuning without retaining earlier examples or receiving task identifiers at inference. No single continual learning mechanism maintains strong retention at this horizon, so the authors compose complementary mechanisms along data/function/weight anchors and low-rank allocation rules. The best method combining all three anchors with merged LoRA ranks among the top 3 methods on all three datasets and raises average final retention from 1.2% to 34.9%, a 28-fold improvement.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research

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RLLBC-Lib: An Educational Code Library for Reinforcement Learning and Learning-Based Control

Researchers release RLLBC-Lib, an educational code library covering tabular and deep reinforcement learning with support for automated grading.

RLLBC-Lib is an educational code library aimed at lowering the entry barrier for students learning reinforcement learning in the context of learning-based control. It comprises a comprehensive library of tabular RL approaches, a deep RL library following the same design principles, and implementations contrasting RL with other learning-based control approaches. The library also serves as a basis for creating programming assignments with automated grading.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 16, 17:15 UTC · 12h agoAI research

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Better answers, broader thinking: What students gain from ChatGPT and critical-thinking training

OpenAI published a randomized study of over 1,000 students examining ChatGPT's effects on critical thinking and performance.

OpenAI released results from a randomized study of more than 1,000 students using ChatGPT on a real-world university assignment. The research examined effects on critical thinking, originality, and student performance. Findings inform ongoing debates about AI's role in education and learning outcomes.

OpenAI News·Aug 27, 09:00 UTC · 20d agoAI research

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Scaling Automatic Research Agents via World Models

WMRL replaces environment execution with a world model in RL, accelerating research-agent post-training 3-4x and letting 4B/9B agents beat 48B/120B open-weight agents.

The paper identifies that environment execution dominates RL training cost for automatic research agents because each execution occupies an exclusive sandbox while generation batches efficiently. World Model RL (WMRL) substitutes a learned world model for execution, with Online Debiasing and Inverse-Variance Denoising to handle reward bias and noise, and the paper proves both improve convergence guarantees. WMRL accelerates training 3-4x across tasks and outperforms standard RL baselines; post-trained 4B and 9B agents beat 48B and 120B open-weight agents on held-out benchmarks. WMRL also transfers to post-training embodied VLA policies.

Hugging Face daily papers·Aug 28, 20:00 UTC · 19d agoAI research1

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Training Specialist Models without Reasoning Trajectories for Domain Expert Distillation

Study shows specialists trained on question-answer pairs implicitly select latent reasoning trajectories, and tuning choices control the precision-generalization trade-off in distillation.

The work demonstrates that specialist optimization implicitly selects from a latent trajectory space when specialists are trained only on question-answer pairs without explicit reasoning supervision. Using student distillation as an agnostic probe across 27 specialist-student pairings, specialization-generalization profiles correlate exceptionally strongly. Explicitly controlling the specialist's distributional drift systematically shifts both teacher and distilled student along a controllable trade-off between domain precision and general-capability retention across chemistry, physics, and multilingual settings, even across divergent model families.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 11, 20:00 UTC · 5d agoAI research

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Can Foundation Models Moderate Online Content? Evaluating Instruction- vs. Example-Driven Policy Operationalization

ModerationBench shows foundation models can nearly triple Bluesky's moderation F1 (0.60 vs 0.22), with instruction- and example-driven guidance performing comparably.

Researchers built ModerationBench, a new benchmark of 4,000 manually annotated in-the-wild posts from Bluesky, to test whether foundation models can reliably operationalize content moderation policies. They systematically compare instruction-driven guidance (reasoning from policy precepts) with example-driven guidance (generalizing from precedents) for Vision-Language Models. Both paradigms achieve comparable peak effectiveness, and foundation models nearly triple the F1 of Bluesky's deployed moderation system on Random Posts (0.60 vs 0.22).

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 9, 16:30 UTC · 7d agoAI research1

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Diffusion Models and Concept Formation

Paper argues diffusion models implicitly form Cobweb-like concept hierarchies, with a basic level emerging at intermediate noise levels.

The authors draw a formal correspondence between diffusion models and Cobweb, a classic incremental concept-hierarchy learner, noting both are hierarchical Bayesian density models with Gaussian prototypes. Modes of the diffusion model's noisy marginals form a hierarchy whose basic level sits at intermediate noise, where class identity commits. The correspondence is tested on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST via mode-finding. Diffusion is reframed as a cognitive model of concept formation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 11, 16:43 UTC · 5d agoAI research

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5 useful things you'll learn in my new post-training textbook (shipping now!)

Nathan Lambert's new RLHF and post-training LLM textbook covers PPO, GRPO, GSPO, CISPO and related techniques, freely available online.

Nathan Lambert's book 'Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback: Aligning and Post-training LLMs' is now shipping from Manning. It covers policy-gradient algorithms including PPO, GRPO, GSPO, CISPO, and RLOO, plus loss aggregation, truncated importance sampling, asynchronous RL systems, and post-training topics like rejection sampling, outcome reward models, and on-policy distillation. The book is freely available online with a 12-hour course, codebase, and exercises.

Interconnects·Aug 10, 13:02 UTC · Aug 10, 2026AI research

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ScienceBuddy: Recursive-in-Recursive Self-Improvement for Interactive Scientific Agents

ScienceBuddy couples harness evolution with model reinforcement learning so scientific agents continually self-improve from researcher feedback in an interactive workspace.

The authors release ScienceBuddy, an interactive scientific research workspace that transforms researcher requests, feedback, and execution evidence into tasks and evaluation rubrics for continual learning. Its recursive-in-recursive self-improvement paradigm couples harness evolution (inner recursion, model fixed) with model reinforcement learning under the improved harness (outer recursion). Case studies span four scientific task families, and the system is released to the scientific community as a research product.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 15, 17:55 UTC · 1d agoAI research 2 sources

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Environments as Scaffold: Enriching Feedback to Bootstrap Self-Evolving Agents in Long-Horizon Tasks

Researchers propose Feedback-Enriched Environments (FEEs) that reduce reward sparsity and improve RL training of Qwen3-based agents on SciWorld and BFCL.

The paper proposes shifting from agent-side warmup (SFT) to environment-side adaptation via Feedback-Enriched Environments to address severe reward sparsity in RL training of long-horizon LLM agents. A pilot study defines a feedback strategy that transitions from action guidance to observation enrichment in later training stages. Large-scale experiments on SciWorld and BFCL across Qwen3 model scales and GRPO, GSPO, and DAPO show consistent gains, plus stabilized training dynamics and proactive exploration.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoAI research

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Revisiting Complete Reasoning Traces for Post-Training

Researchers show full reasoning traces provide limited benefit in LLM post-training, with heavily truncated or endpoint-only trajectories performing comparably.

A pilot study plus attention-based analyses and controlled token-removal studies show intermediate tokens in reasoning trajectories contribute minimally to final reasoning quality. Partial trajectories remain effective even under heavy truncation, and training on endpoints alone leads to consistent changes in reasoning behavior. The finding also benefits reinforcement-learning and on-policy distillation post-training; code is released at github.com/naver-ai/revisiting-trace.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research

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Inoculation Midtraining with Learned Neologisms

Inoculation Midtraining confines unsafe LLM behavior to a neologism-marked context, reducing misalignment after unsafe post-training but leaking under nearby contextual cues.

The paper introduces Inoculation Midtraining, which teaches a base model during midtraining that unsafe behavior belongs to a context marked by a learned neologism token, then post-trains on unsafe data within that context. Across supervised fine-tuning and RL post-training regimes, the technique reduces misalignment while preserving transfer of benign properties like German or Shakespearean prose. However, it does not outperform standard Inoculation Prompting, is sensitive to training configuration, and produces a leaky boundary that nearby contextual cues can reactivate. The authors conclude it is not yet a load-bearing component of a developer safety framework.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 14, 17:12 UTC · 2d agoAI safety & security

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Convergent Emergence of In-Context Learning Across Modalities

Controlled experiments show few-shot in-context learning emerges across six modalities including language, genomes, images, and proteins, partially supporting a convergence hypothesis.

The paper tests the Convergent Emergence Hypothesis: that few-shot in-context learning, when it emerges, shares a common cross-modality difficulty profile. A controlled framework instantiated the same task suite across six modalities: language, genome, integer sequences, time series, images, and proteins. Paired-mapping ICL emerged in all six modalities, surpassed controlled baselines, and showed correlated per-task effects in five of them, providing partial support for the hypothesis.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 11, 20:00 UTC · 5d agoAI research

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AuK Technical Report: An Open-Source Foundational Model for Speech Generation and Editing

Open-source speech foundation model AuK unifies generation and editing, trained on 1.95 million hours, with distilled AuK-Flash achieving 4.5x speedup.

AuK is an open-source foundational model that unifies speech generation and editing through natural-language instructions and audio context, trained on approximately 3.03 billion instruction-audio instances and 1.95 million hours of supervision across five task families including generation, content editing, and acoustic editing. It combines a multimodal LLM for semantic conditioning, a VAE jointly trained on speech, general audio, and music, and a hybrid rectified-flow Transformer using dual-stream MMDiT blocks followed by unified single-stream DiT blocks. Post-training applies human-feedback preference optimization for editing and reward-based reinforcement learning for generation, and the distilled AuK-Flash performs 4-step inference without classifier-free guidance at a 4.5x wall-clock speedup. Source code and model weights are released.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoModel release2

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[AINews] 10% worse, 100x cheaper, 10000x faster: Why Simulation is taking over

Latent Space argues AI training pipeline stages—rewards, data, teachers, curricula, environments—are flipping from human-made to model-made simulation.

Latent Space's AINews essay traces how each component of AI training has turned synthetic since 2022: reward models (InstructGPT, RLAIF), synthetic pretraining data (Microsoft Phi, NVIDIA Nemotron-4 340B), model teachers (Alpaca, DeepSeek-R1 distillation), and self-generated curricula (Self-Rewarding Language Models, SPIN). In 2026 it highlights Karpathy's autoresearch loop—700 experiments yielding 20 kept improvements, cutting GPT-2 training time from 2.02 to 1.80 hours—and Z.ai's GLM-5.3 fully synthetic RL environment, judging, and verification stack. It frames these shifts as 'simulation': 10% worse but 100x cheaper and 10,000x faster than human equivalents.

Latent Space·Aug 22, 07:36 UTC · 25d agoAI industry

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A*-Thought-V2: Efficient Latent Reasoning via Geometric Dynamics of LLM

A*-Thought-V2 compresses chain-of-thought into latent tokens using geometric hidden-state dynamics, cutting computation while improving accuracy on Qwen models.

A*-Thought-V2 models chain-of-thought as a hidden-state trajectory and interleaves explicit text with continuous latent tokens, compressing steps whose transitions deviate from the question-to-solution direction. Trained via stepwise embedding forcing and label forcing with soft multi-modal supervision, it was evaluated on Qwen3.5-9B and Qwen3.6-27B across six benchmarks. Reported results include up to 2.6% average accuracy gain, up to 50% shorter responses, 2.29x higher Accuracy per Computation Unit, 94.6% faster preprocessing, and up to 80.3% faster training.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 13:56 UTC · 9d agoAI research

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Expert-Space Exploration in MoE Reinforcement Learning

ESRL explores MoE expert-routing space during RL post-training, improving Qwen3-30B-A3B Pass@1 by 3.2 points over GRPO without extra compute.

The paper shows perturbing expert routing increases rollout diversity similarly to higher decoding temperature, but naive perturbation degrades quality. ESRL anchors high-confidence experts, restricts stochastic routing to a plausible candidate pool, adapts perturbation strength via router entropy, and replays recorded expert paths during policy optimization. It achieves the best results across top-K, top-1, and shared-expert MoE backbones on math, science, and code tasks; on Qwen3-30B-A3B it improves average Pass@1 and Pass@8 over GRPO by 3.2 and 4.5 percentage points.

Hugging Face daily papers·updated Sep 11, 16:58 UTC · 5d ago·first Sep 10, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoAI research 2 sources

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AgenticGen: Reward-Guided Agentic Video Generation for Advertising

AgenticGen applies DPO and GRPO reward-guided reasoning to ad video generation, improving TikTok CTR 2.72%, CVR 2.63%, and Advv 9.61%.

AgenticGen decomposes advertising video generation into two trainable reasoning stages, strategy selection and draft generation, supervised by online business feedback. It learns a performance-based reward from accumulated online feedback plus a rubric-based reward aligned with human quality standards, then optimizes policies with DPO followed by GRPO using process and outcome rewards. Online A/B experiments in the TikTok advertising system show CTR up 2.72%, CVR up 2.63%, and Advv up 9.61% over an SFT baseline.

Hugging Face daily papers·Aug 30, 20:00 UTC · 17d agoAI research

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ActReview: Rebuttal-Guided Training Data and Rubric Rewards for Actionable Peer Review Generation

ActReview post-trains Qwen3-8B-Base on 40K rebuttal-derived instances with rubric rewards to generate actionable, grounded peer-review feedback, plus a 1,000-instance benchmark.

The framework builds ActReview-40K from real OpenReview review-rebuttal threads, aligning reviewer weaknesses with author responses and grounding feedback in localized paper evidence. Qwen3-8B-Base is post-trained with multi-task supervised fine-tuning followed by GRPO using candidate-aware, weakness-specific rubric rewards. Experiments show improved actionability and grounding over prior specialized review-generation models, supported by ActReview-Bench, a human-curated 1,000-instance evaluation set. Human evaluation confirms better revision usefulness while noting a remaining gap in technical accuracy.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:30 UTC · 8d agoAI research1

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