Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL) have underscored its potential for incentivizing reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing step-level efforts suffer from costly annotations that limit domain coverage, while scalar scores further impose an information bottleneck, offering insufficient semantic bandwidth to improve intermediate decisions. Alternative language-critique approaches, which rely on frozen or external critics, provide richer textual feedback but lack the scalability needed for sustained policy improvement. In this work, we propose language-driven stepwise trajectory redirection, termed as STRIDE, a novel training framework that shifts process supervision from scalar rewards to learnable stepwise language feedback. Specifically, we co-train a generator and a generative verifier using only outcome-based rewards, eliminating external annotations, while delivering sustained policy improvement through jointly aligned verifier training. The verifier's stepwise language critiques explicitly localize and explain failures, enabling the generator to redirect reasoning trajectories at intermediate steps toward alternative decisions. The trajectory redirection design guarantees harmless policy improvement, even under noisy or suboptimal verifier feedback. Experiments on diverse reasoning benchmarks show that STRIDE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, as well as achieving breakthroughs on zero-pass-rate problems where scalar methods yield no learning signal in our ablation studies, demonstrating the effectiveness of learnable stepwise language feedback for enhancing LLM reasoning.
Strong reasoning depends not only on model knowledge but also on how effectively cognitive behaviors are deployed during generation. Existing methods often rely on explicit behavior-level control, making them insufficiently adaptive when failures and required corrections vary across reasoning states, tasks, and models. To this end, we propose Latent Reward Steering (LRS), an adaptive inference-time framework that promotes cognitive behaviors by optimizing the sparse-autoencoder (SAE) latent states that implicitly carry them. Rather than relying on predefined cognitive behaviors or steering directions derived from them, LRS trains a latent reward model on reasoning traces by final answer correctness to estimate the quality of intermediate latent states. During inference, reward gradients provide state-specific correction directions for fragile latent states, while a reward and confidence gate restricts intervention to states the reward signal flags as fragile. Experiments on multiple reasoning LLM backbones and benchmarks show that \ours consistently improves performance over various baselines, and post-hoc analyses further indicate that \ours implicitly promotes good cognitive behaviors that fix the original reasoning errors. Code is available at: https://github.com/jiakanglee/Latent-Reward-Steering.
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is widely used to improve reasoning in large language models, but rewards only final-answer correctness with no supervision over intermediate steps. Rubric-based methods such as Rubrics as Rewards (RaR) introduce finer-grained supervision by scoring rollouts against structured criteria, yet the rubric scores are still aggregated into a single scalar applied to the entire response, causing three weaknesses: loss of multi-criterion structure, uniform supervision of correct and incorrect steps, and reward hacking through unbounded self-correction. On 1,000 problems, we find 18.2% of steps in correct-answer responses are wrong yet positively rewarded, while 49.9% of steps in incorrect-answer responses are correct yet penalized. We introduce Step-wise Rubrics as Rewards (SRaR), an RLVR framework that (i) uses an LLM judge to attribute each rubric item to a specific reasoning step, (ii) normalizes per-step rubric scores across rollouts so only steps whose quality varies produce a learning signal, and (iii) combines the per-step reward with the outcome reward through a decoupled advantage estimator that keeps the outcome baseline stable. We further build a 16K-problem rubric dataset by contrastively distilling rubric items from correct and flawed reasoning paths sampled from a strong model. Across six mathematical reasoning benchmarks, SRaR improves average accuracy over RaR by 3.57 points on Qwen3-8B and 2.75 points on Qwen3-32B, raises the Faithful Reasoning Rate on AIME 2025 from 34.5% to 46.7%, and reduces self-correction looping from 48.1% to 26.5%.
Large language models show strong reasoning ability, but their internal reasoning process can remain unstable in complex multi-step settings, where early hidden-state errors may propagate to incorrect predictions. We propose ReLAR, a reinforcement-guided latent refinement framework that iteratively updates hidden representations before decoding. ReLAR maintains a compact latent reasoning state and uses learned depth and action controllers to adaptively determine both the number and direction of refinement steps. The controllers are trained with a policy gradient objective based on step-wise likelihood improvement, enabling efficient input-dependent reasoning without explicit chain-of-thought generation. Experiments on medical, mathematical, multi-hop reasoning, and open-ended generation benchmarks show that ReLAR improves accuracy, generation quality, and reasoning stability with substantially lower inference overhead than explicit reasoning baselines.