Automating optimization modeling with LLMs is a promising path toward scalable decision intelligence, but existing approaches either rely on agentic pipelines built on closed-source LLMs with high inference latency or fine-tune smaller LLMs using costly process supervision that often overfits to a single solver API. We study how reinforcement learning from inexpensive outcome labels can improve optimization modeling and support reuse across heterogeneous solver environments. To this end, we propose Optimization Modeling from Solver Outcomes (OMSO), which uses reinforcement learning (RL) with a mathematical programming solver as a deterministic, interactive environment. Given a natural-language problem and a target solver, OMSO generates solver-specific code, executes it in a sandboxed harness, and converts execution outcomes into scalar rewards in a closed-loop generate-execute-feedback-update process. This RL formulation learns optimization modeling without process-level supervision and supports cross-solver generalization by switching the solver environment rather than reconstructing solver-specific datasets. Experiments on NL4OPT, MAMO, IndustryOR, and OptiBench across Gurobi, OR-Tools, and COPT show that OMSO matches or outperforms process-supervised SFT, supports zero-shot training-free transfer, direct RL training, and SFT-cold-started RL, and improves modeling reasoning and semantic correctness beyond solver API usage.
Yuhang Wu, Xiangqing Shen Nanjing University, Fanfan Wang, Cangqi Zhou Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Zhen Wu Nanjing University, Xinyu Dai Nanjing University, Rui Xia Nanjing University
Rerankers play a pivotal role in refining retrieval results for Retrieval-Augmented Generation. However, current reranking models are typically optimized on static human annotated relevance labels in isolation, decoupled from the downstream generation process. This isolation leads to a fundamental misalignment: documents identified as topically relevant by information retrieval metrics often fail to provide the actual utility required by the LLM for precise answer generation. To bridge this gap, we introduce ReRanking Preference Optimization (RRPO), a reinforcement learning framework that directly aligns reranking with the LLM’s generation quality. By formulating reranking as a sequential decision-making process, RRPO optimizes for context utility using LLM feedback, thereby eliminating the need for expensive human annotations. To ensure training stability, we further introduce a reference-anchored deterministic baseline. Extensive experiments on knowledge-intensive benchmarks demonstrate that RRPO significantly outperforms strong baselines, including the powerful list-wise reranker RankZephyr. Further analysis highlights the versatility of our framework: it generalizes seamlessly to diverse readers (e.g., GPT-4o), integrates orthogonally with query expansion modules like Query2Doc, and remains robust even when trained with noisy supervisors.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表