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Kongcheng Zhang

8 accepted papers

2026

Breaking the Exploration Bottleneck: Rubric-Scaffolded Reinforcement Learning for General LLM Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have underscored the potential of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to facilitate the emergence of reasoning capabilities. Despite the encouraging results, a fundamental dilemma persists as RL improvement relies on learning from high-quality samples, yet the…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Experience is the Best Teacher: Motivating Effective Exploration in Reinforcement Learning for LLMs

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning (RL) with rubric-based rewards has recently shown remarkable progress in enhancing general reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet still suffers from ineffective exploration confined to current policy distribution. In fact, RL optimization can be viewed as …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Incentivizing LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning with Functional Monte Carlo Tree Search

ICLR 2026poster

In this work, we propose ***R**einforced **F**unctional **T**oken **T**uning* (RFTT), a novel reinforced fine-tuning framework that empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with learn-to-reason capabilities. Unlike prior prompt-driven reasoning efforts, RFTT embeds a rich set of learnable functional to…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Replay Failures as Successes: Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Instruction Following

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to follow instructions with various constraints. Despite the encouraging results, RL improvement inevitably relies on sampling successful, high-quality responses; however, the initial model often struggles to gen…

Cited by 4SourceScholar
2025

Consistent Paths Lead to Truth: Self-Rewarding Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent advances of Reinforcement Learning (RL) have highlighted its potential in complex reasoning tasks, yet effective training often relies on external supervision, which limits the broader applicability. In this work, we propose a novel self-rewarding reinforcement learning framework to enhance L…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

MUSE: MCTS-Driven Red Teaming Framework for Enhanced Multi-Turn Dialogue Safety in Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

As large language models (LLMs) become widely adopted, ensuring their alignment with human values is crucial to prevent jailbreaks where adversaries manipulate models to produce harmful content. While most defenses target single-turn attacks, real-world usage often involves multi-turn dialogues, exp

2025

Odyssey : Empowering Minecraft Agents with Open-World Skills

IJCAI 2025

Recent studies have delved into constructing generalist agents for open-world environments like Minecraft. Despite the encouraging results, existing efforts mainly focus on solving basic programmatic tasks, e.g., material collection and tool-crafting following the Minecraft tech-tree, treating the O

2025

SeRL: Self-play Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models with Limited Data

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent advances have demonstrated the effectiveness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in improving the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing works inevitably rely on high-quality instructions and verifiable rewards for effective training, both of which are often diff…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar