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Video-R1: Reinforcing Video Reasoning in MLLMs

Neural Information Processing Systems

Inspired by DeepSeek-R1's success in eliciting reasoning abilities through rule-based reinforcement learning (RL), we introduce Video-R1 as the first attempt to systematically explore the R1 paradigm for incentivizing video reasoning within multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, directly applying RL training with the GRPO algorithm to video reasoning presents two primary challenges: (i) a lack of temporal modeling for video reasoning, and (ii) the scarcity of high-quality video-reasoning data. To address these issues, we first propose the T-GRPO algorithm, which encourages models to utilize temporal information in videos for reasoning. Additionally, instead of relying solely on video data, we incorporate high-quality image-reasoning data into the training process. We have constructed two datasets: Video-R1-CoT-165k for SFT cold start and Video-R1-260k for RL training, both comprising image and video data. Experimental results demonstrate that Video-R1 achieves significant improvements on video reasoning benchmarks such as VideoMMMU and VSI-Bench, as well as on general video benchmarks including MVBench and TempCompass, etc. Notably, Video-R1-7B attains a 37.1\% accuracy on video spatial reasoning benchmark VSI-bench, surpassing the commercial proprietary model GPT-4o. All code, models, and data will be released.


LLM-Explorer: A Plug-in Reinforcement Learning Policy Exploration Enhancement Driven by Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Policy exploration is critical in reinforcement learning (RL), where existing approaches include $\epsilon$-greedy, Gaussian process, etc. However, these approaches utilize preset stochastic processes and are indiscriminately applied in all kinds of RL tasks without considering task-specific features that influence policy exploration. Moreover, during RL training, the evolution of such stochastic processes is rigid, which typically only incorporates a decay in the variance, failing to adjust flexibly according to the agent's real-time learning status. Inspired by the analyzing and reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs), we design **LLM-Explorer** to adaptively generate task-specific exploration strategies with LLMs, enhancing the policy exploration in RL. In our design, we sample the learning trajectory of the agent during the RL training in a given task and prompt the LLM to analyze the agent's current policy learning status and then generate a probability distribution for future policy exploration. Updating the probability distribution periodically, we derive a stochastic process specialized for the particular task and dynamically adjusted to adapt to the learning process. Our design is a plug-in module compatible with various widely applied RL algorithms, including the DQN series, DDPG, TD3, and any possible variants developed based on them. Through extensive experiments on the Atari and MuJoCo benchmarks, we demonstrate LLM-Explorer's capability to enhance RL policy exploration, achieving an average performance improvement up to 37.27%.


Is PRM Necessary? Problem-Solving RL Implicitly Induces PRM Capability in LLMs

Neural Information Processing Systems

The development of reasoning capabilities represents a critical frontier in large language models (LLMs) research, where reinforcement learning (RL) and process reward models (PRMs) have emerged as predominant methodological frameworks. Contrary to conventional wisdom, empirical evidence from DeepSeek-R1 demonstrates that pure RL training focused on mathematical problem-solving can progressively enhance reasoning abilities without PRM integration, challenging the perceived necessity of process supervision. In this study, we conduct a systematic investigation of the relationship between RL training and PRM capabilities. Our findings demonstrate that problem-solving proficiency and process supervision capabilities represent complementary dimensions of reasoning that co-evolve synergistically during pure RL training. In particular, current PRMs underperform simple baselines like majority voting when applied to state-of-the-art models such as DeepSeek-R1 and QwQ-32B. To address this limitation, we propose Self-PRM, an introspective framework in which models autonomously evaluate and rerank their generated solutions through self-reward mechanisms. Although Self-PRM consistently improves the accuracy of the benchmark (particularly with larger sample sizes), analysis exposes persistent challenges: The approach exhibits low precision (<10\%) on difficult problems, frequently misclassifying flawed solutions as valid. These analyses underscore the need for combined training with process supervision and continued RL scaling to enhance reward alignment and introspective accuracy. We hope these findings provide actionable insights for building more reliable and self-aware complex reasoning models.


Accelerating Reinforcement Learning Training Using Simulation Surrogate Models

arXiv.org Machine Learning

High-fidelity simulation models are widely used to analyze complex stochastic systems, but their high computational cost motivates the development of cheaper surrogate models that approximate the simulation model's input-output relationship. In parallel, reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful framework for making online decisions in stochastic environments, with increasing attention being given to the use of simulation models as training environments for RL models. We investigate a class of surrogate models suitable for accelerating RL training in settings where the reward structure, model parameters, or system dynamics change over time and explore their interactions with simulation models and RL models. Through numerical experiments on a stochastic service system modeled via discrete-event simulation, we demonstrate that leveraging surrogate models can substantially accelerate RL training and re-training.







Grounded ReinforcementLearning: LearningtoWintheGameunderHumanCommands

Neural Information Processing Systems

From the RL perspective, it is extremely challenging to derive a precise rewardfunction forhuman preferences since thecommands areabstract and the valid behaviors are highly complicated and multi-modal.