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Zhaolin Gao

8 accepted papers

2026

Prompt Curriculum Learning for Efficient LLM Post-Training

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely used to post-train large language models for tasks such as mathematical reasoning and coding. However, the convergence of RL training remains sensitive to batching and prompt selection strategies. We investigate the factors that affect convergence, including bat…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

$Q\sharp$: Provably Optimal Distributional RL for LLM Post-Training

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training is crucial for LLM alignment and reasoning, but existing policy-based methods, such as PPO and DPO, can fall short of fixing shortcuts inherited from pre-training. In this work, we introduce $Q\sharp$, a value-based algorithm for KL-regularized RL that guide…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Accelerating RL for LLM Reasoning with Optimal Advantage Regression

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to improve complex reasoning abilities. However, state-of-the-art policy optimization methods often suffer from high computational overhead and memory consumption, primarily due to the need for mu…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Pre-trained Large Language Models Learn to Predict Hidden Markov Models In-context

NeurIPS 2025poster

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are fundamental tools for modeling sequential data with latent states that follow Markovian dynamics. However, they present significant challenges in model fitting and computational efficiency on real-world datasets. In this work, we demonstrate that pre-trained large l…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Regressing the Relative Future: Efficient Policy Optimization for Multi-turn RLHF

ICLR 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success at tasks like summarization that involve a single turn of interaction. However, they can still struggle with multi-turn tasks like dialogue that require long-term planning. Previous works on multi-turn dialogue extend single-turn reinforc…

2025

Value-Guided Search for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

NeurIPS 2025poster

In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient method for value model training on long-context reasoning traces. Compared to existing process reward models (PRMs), our method does not require a fine-grained notion of ``step,'' which is difficult to define for long-context reasoning models. By coll…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

REBEL: Reinforcement Learning via Regressing Relative Rewards

NeurIPS 2024poster

While originally developed for continuous control problems, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has emerged as the work-horse of a variety of reinforcement learning (RL) applications, including the fine-tuning of generative models. Unfortunately, PPO requires multiple heuristics to enable stable conv…

2020

Shoestring: Graph-Based Semi-Supervised Classification With Severely Limited Labeled Data

CVPR 2020poster

Graph-based semi-supervised learning has been shown to be one of the most effective classification approaches, as it can exploit connectivity patterns between labeled and unlabeled samples to improve learning performance. However, we show that existing techniques perform poorly when labeled data are…

Cited by 56PDFScholar