Reinforcement learning is having a moment - and not just this week. Some of its directions are already showing huge promise, while others are still early but exciting. Here’s a look at what’s happening right now in RL:
1. Reinforcement Pre-Training (RPT) → Reinforcement Pre-Training (2506.08007) Reframes next-token pretraining as RL with verifiable rewards, yielding scalable reasoning gains
2. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) → Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences (1706.03741) The top approach. It trains a model using human preference feedback, building a reward model and then optimizing the policy to generate outputs people prefer