Ik-hwan Kim

Author directory

2026

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards with GRPO is a standard approach for post-training reasoning LLMs. It remains sample inefficient. Each rollout is used for a single gradient update and then discarded. Naive replay is not well suited in this setting because LLM policies drift quickly per gradient step. Stored rollouts therefore become stale and can destabilize training. We propose a rollout-level replay buffer for GRPO that stores and samples individual rollouts rather than whole groups. The buffer bounds staleness through age eviction. Any rollout older than τ_max training steps is removed. The buffer also preserves on-policy data via fresh-anchored composition. Each batch keeps its fresh on-policy rollouts and then concatenates replay rollouts drawn separately from the buffer. We prioritize replay by per-rollout advantage magnitude and recycle individual rollouts whose advantages are large. Across three Qwen3-Base scales on five math benchmarks, our method outperforms GRPO and naive replay baselines. Gains are positive at every scale and reach +1.66 pp on the five-benchmark average at 4B. Under an AES metric that jointly measures accuracy and token efficiency, our method is the only condition with a positive margin over GRPO at every scale.

2025

Multi-hop reasoning, which requires multi-step reasoning based on the supporting documents within a given context, remains challenging for large language models (LLMs). LLMs often struggle to filter out irrelevant documents within the context, and their performance is sensitive to the absolute position of supporting documents within that context. In this paper, we identify an additional challenge: LLMs’ performance is also sensitive to the order, relative position, in which the supporting documents are presented. We refer to this as the misordered context problem. To address this issue, based on the theoretical approach, we propose a simple yet effective method called context repetition (CoRe), which involves prompting the model by repeatedly presenting the context. This ensures that certain contiguous reasoning segments within supporting documents are presented in the optimal order, effectively guiding the model’s reasoning in the appropriate direction. Applying CoRe, we improve the F1 score by up to 30%p on multi-hop QA tasks and increase accuracy by up to 70%p on a synthetic task. Additionally, CoRe helps mitigate the well-known “lost-in-the-middle” problem in LLMs and can be effectively combined with retrieval-based approaches utilizing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning.
Personalized AI assistants, a hallmark of the human-like capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), are a challenging application that intertwines multiple problems in LLM research. Despite the growing interest in the development of personalized assistants, the lack of an open-source conversational dataset tailored for personalization remains a significant obstacle for researchers in the field. To address this research gap, we introduce HiCUPID, a new benchmark to probe and unleash the potential of LLMs to deliver personalized responses. Alongside a conversational dataset, HiCUPID provides a Llama-3.2-based automated evaluation model whose assessment closely mirrors human preferences. We release our dataset, evaluation model, and code at https://github.com/12kimih/HiCUPID.