arXiv Computation and Language

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.

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 AI
Oct 15

Verifiable Process Rewards for Agentic Reasoning

The paper introduces Verifiable Process Rewards (VPR), a framework that uses symbolic or algorithmic task-solving oracles as action-level verifiers to provide dense rewards for intermediate actions in agentic reasoning tasks. VPR is applied to Sokoban, Sudoku, and Minesweeper, and improves policy performance over outcome-reward baselines. The authors also demonstrate VPR’s effectiveness in a tool‑use benchmark, highlighting its reliance on reliable task oracles and the difficulty of extending it to less structured environments.

By Huining Yuan, Zelai Xu, Huaijie Wang, Xiangmin Yi, Jiaxuan Gao, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Yu Wang, Chao Yu, Yi Wu
arXiv AI
Oct 2

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
Oct 2

SPIRAL: Learning to Search and Aggregate

SPIRAL is a reinforcement‑learning framework that trains language models to employ three inference primitives—sequential reasoning within a trace, parallel sampling of independent traces, and aggregation of those traces—within a single compute pipeline. The model first generates multiple independent chain‑of‑thought traces in parallel, then produces a final aggregation trace conditioned on them, with all components optimized end‑to‑end for the reward of the aggregated response. Experiments on reasoning tasks demonstrate that SPIRAL scales efficiently with inference compute, achieving up to 11× better scaling efficiency and 15% higher performance compared to the GRPO baseline when all three primitives are scaled.

By Jubayer Ibn Hamid, Ifdita Hasan Orney, Michael Y. Li, Omar Shaikh, Yoonho Lee, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn, Noah Goodman