23 points by teleforce 3 hours ago | 3 comments
ArchieScrivener 1 hour ago
From Jan 2026.

This is very interesting:

"Empirical Validation. While we cannot verify these theoretically, we evaluate each empirically. We use the Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct model (Hui et al., 2024) as the base policy and the ToolAlpaca dataset (Tang et al., 2023). In this benchmark, the model receives a tool-API specification and a user request, and must identify the correct tool call. Without demonstrations, the base model solves only 42% of examples. When provided with the appropriate demonstration c for each prompt x , the teacher achieves a 100% success rate. To further test reward proximity, we manually inspected 50 teacher reasoning traces. In all cases, not only were the final tool calls correct, but the intermediate chain-of-thought was valid and semantically grounded. This suggests that the teacher is reconstructing a correct reasoning process rather than merely copying the expert output. These observations provide evidence for the first requirement, that the demonstration-conditioned model behaves as an optimal policy."

airstrike 2 hours ago
Both title and abstract feel a little too confident, which ironically makes me more skeptical rather than less.

I find the choice of the words "enable" in the title and "establishing" at the end of the abstract to be particularly jarring.

greesil 1 hour ago
Wtf is a policy? Is this some sort of RL thing that I'm too ML to understand?

Gemini tells me it's the probability of the next token for an LLM. Okay then.

Ifkaluva 2 minutes ago
It’s quite common these days to treat an LLM as a policy in the sense that it takes as a “state” the previous context, and its task is to choose a continuation, as an “action”. It gets a “reward” from a reward model that was trained on human preferences, or from a verifiable source, such as passing test cases.

This framing has been active for several years, as it’s the framing that enables RLHF and RLVR. RLHF itself is quite old, I think since the original chatGPT.

mountainriver 1 hour ago
What is this comment? It’s an RL paper, these are standard RL terms
greesil 1 hour ago
It's a comment. On Hacker News. Not the RL subreddit, or whatever. I'm just amazed at the jargon. I'm sure it's useful, but one could just call it model output.