# Harnessing Rule-Based Reinforcement Learning for Enhanced Grammatical Error Correction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18780 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18780/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reinforcement learning for reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 17 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reinforcement learning for reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reinforcement-learning-for-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09516/) (2025)
- [SimPO: Simple Preference Optimization with a Reference-Free Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14734/) (2024)
- [GECToR -- Grammatical Error Correction: Tag, Not Rewrite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12592/) (2020)
- [ToRL: Scaling Tool-Integrated RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23383/) (2025)
- [Is ChatGPT a Highly Fluent Grammatical Error Correction System? A Comprehensive Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01746/) (2023)
- [Seq2Edits: Sequence Transduction Using Span-level Edit Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11136/) (2020)
- [Multi-Task Instruction Tuning of LLaMa for Specific Scenarios: A Preliminary Study on Writing Assistance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13225/) (2023)
- [Data Weighted Training Strategies for Grammatical Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02976/) (2020)
- [Improving Grammatical Error Correction via Contextual Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17456/) (2024)
- [Evaluating the Capability of Large-scale Language Models on Chinese Grammatical Error Correction Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03972/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Grammatical error correction is a significant task in NLP. Traditional methods based on encoder-decoder models have achieved certain success, but the application of LLMs in this field is still underexplored. Current research predominantly relies on supervised fine-tuning to train LLMs to directly generate the corrected sentence, which limits the model's powerful reasoning ability. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework based on Rule-Based RL. Through experiments on the Chinese datasets, our Rule-Based RL framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, with a notable increase in recall. This result clearly highlights the advantages of using RL to steer LLMs, offering a more controllable and reliable paradigm for future development in GEC.