arXiv AI

Don't Peek at the Answer: Outcome-Masked Group Relative Policy Optimization for Label-Free RLVR

arXiv:2608. 03119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves LLM reasoning but typically relies on ground-truth (GT) answers, limiting scalability.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

Implicit Actor Critic Coupling via a Supervised Learning Framework for RLVR

arXiv:2509. 02522v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have empowered large language models (LLMs) to tackle challenging reasoning tasks such as mathematics and programming, however existing RLVR methods often suffer from sparse reward signals and unstable policy gradient updates inherent to RL-based approaches.

By Jiaming Li, Longze Chen, Ze Gong, Yukun Chen, Lu Wang, Wanwei He, Run Luo, Min Yang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

ConsensusBench: Benchmark of Consensus Nodes for LLM Reasoning via Outcome Reward Densifying

ConsensusBench is a new dataset that supplies rule‑based process‑level signals for large language model reasoning. It identifies key intermediate conclusions—called Consensus Nodes—by filtering correct trajectories and clustering semantically equivalent statements. By incorporating a process reward derived from these nodes into GRPO‑style reinforcement learning, the authors create ConsensusPR, which reduces reward sparsity and improves performance on benchmarks such as AIME, GSM8K, and MATH‑500.

By Shi-Qi Yan, Chao-Hong Tan, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Xiangang Li, Zhen-Hua Ling
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Advantage Collapse in Group Relative Policy Optimization: Diagnosis and Mitigation

arXiv:2605. 21125v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a prominent algorithm within the Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) framework, has achieved strong results in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs).

By Xixiang He, Qiyao Sun, Ao Cheng, Xingming Li, Xuanyu Ji, Hailun Lu, Runke Huang, Qingyong Hu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

ConSteer-RL: Steering Reasoning Capabilities in Large Language Models via Confidence-Aware Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 08088v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently become a key paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it remains limited by sparse binary rewards and its ignorance of model-internal uncertainty.

By Qing Miao, Yiming Zhao, Jing Yang, Chenxi Liu, Yuehai Chen, Yuewen Liu, Shaoyi Du, Badong Chen
arXiv AI
1d ago

Your Language Model is Its Own Critic: Reinforcement Learning with Value Estimation from Actor's Internal States

The paper introduces POISE, a reinforcement learning algorithm that uses a model’s internal states as a value estimator to reduce variance in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). By employing a lightweight probe that reads internal signals during the forward pass, POISE predicts baselines online and uses a cross‑rollout construction to keep gradients unbiased. Experiments on Qwen3‑4B and OLMo3‑7B‑Instruct‑DPO across six domains show POISE outperforms existing RLVR baselines, offering more stable training and a value model that generalizes across tasks and scales with the policy.

By Yunho Choi, Jongwon Lim, Woojin Ahn, Minjae Oh, Jeonghoon Shim, Yohan Jo
arXiv AI
Jun 30

BV-Blend: Uncertainty-Weighted Historical Baselines for Stable Critic-Free RL with Verifiable Rewards

arXiv:2606. 28707v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Critic-free reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), exemplified by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), avoids training a value function (critic) and reduces memory and compute overhead relative to critic-based PPO pipelines for aligning large language models.

By Yupeng Chang, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

Gradients Know What Outcomes Don't: Unlocking Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning with Gradient-Aligned Rewards

The paper introduces Gradient-Aligned Reward (GAR), a reinforcement learning technique that uses truncated backpropagation to generate a compact gradient vector for each rollout and compares it to an expert-anchor gradient via cosine similarity. This dense, reasoning-aware reward improves large language model chain-of-thought reasoning on math benchmarks and transfers to other tasks without domain‑specific data, while adding less than 9% computational overhead. GAR outperforms existing baselines such as GRPO on Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B models.

By Leqi Zheng, Jinbo Su, Fang Niu, Chaokun Wang, Weiping Wang, Jiajun Zhang, Shannan Yan, Jie Wu, Zhaolu Kang, Rong Fu, Hang Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Boosting LLM Exploration via Weak-Model Guidance in RLVR

The paper introduces a method to enhance large language model (LLM) exploration in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) by guiding the target model with partial reasoning trajectories from smaller, weaker language models. This weak-model guidance disrupts over‑confidence, preserves generative diversity, and mitigates entropy collapse without extra fine‑tuning or complex reward designs. Experiments on mathematical benchmarks show consistent improvements over vanilla RLVR, especially as the number of allowed attempts ($k$) increases, indicating broader reasoning coverage.

By Xingyu Shen, Huishuai Zhang, Peng Li, Yinchun Wang, Dongyan Zhao