arXiv:2610.20497v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) trains language models from checked task outcomes, but assigning a terminal reward to individual...
By Wei Chen, Yubing Wu, Zhou Xu, Haoyue Zhang, Delu Zeng, Jiahao Wang, Junmei Yang, Pan tiewen, Jingfeng Liu, Zhiheng Zhou, Bo Li, Min Chen
arXiv:2607. 26253v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is bottlenecked by rollout generation, yet many sampled prompts produce saturated groups (all responses correct or all incorrect) whose zero reward variance yields no policy-gradient signal.
By Pixel Nomand, Elena Voss, Marcus Hale, Sofia Reyes
Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) for mathematical reasoning suffers from a structural blind spot: on "cliff" prompts-those on which every sampled rollout in a group fails-the group-normalized advantage is identically zero, so GRPO produces no gradient on precisely the prompts at the frontier of the model's capability. We introduce LoRA Scaffolded Policy Optimization (LSPO), a sampling-time mechanism that recovers this lost gradient.
arXiv:2607. 18163v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: PPO and the GRPO baseline studied here use clipped surrogate objectives whose favorable-direction saturation introduces an abrupt change in the scalar objective's derivative.
By Chinmay Rane, Kanishka Tyagi, Michael Manry
arXiv:2607. 16244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training multi-turn evidence-reading agents with outcome-only reinforcement learning is unstable because intermediate turns receive little direct credit.
By Hao Dou
arXiv:2607. 27787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) for mathematical reasoning suffers from a structural blind spot: on "cliff" prompts-those on which every sampled rollout in a group fails-the group-normalized advantage is identically zero, so GRPO produces no gradient on precisely the prompts at the frontier of the model's capability.
By Ken Ding
The paper critiques the use of pass@$k$ as a sole metric for evaluating reinforcement‑learning post‑training on language models, showing that it ignores diversity in model outputs. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑1.5B‑Instruct trained with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and rejection‑sampling fine‑tuning (RFT) reveal that these methods shift token‑level, answer‑level, and unique‑answer diversity in opposite directions, yet pass@$k$ fails to capture these differences. Even when restricting to verifier‑correct completions, diversity gaps persist, and pass@$k$ does not consistently identify the better performing arm on hard problem subsets, indicating that the metric can mask true capability changes.
By Subham Rath, Raj Dandekar, Rajat Dandekar, Sreedath Panat
arXiv:2608. 00220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that on-policy reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can improve the current objective while making successful behaviors for later objectives too rare to sample and reinforce.
By Shaohang Wei, Zikun Su, Feifan Song, Wen Luo, Wei Li, Guangyue Peng, Houfeng Wang
arXiv:2609.39634v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Common policy improvement methods, including TRPO, PPO, and GRPO, estimate policy improvement under the behavioral policy's state-visitation distribu...
By Nima H. Siboni
The paper introduces Circuit Reasoning Score (CRS), a data‑selection signal for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards that uses attention‑head activity from a frozen base model to gauge reasoning engagement. CRS is computed in a single forward pass without reward labels or rollouts, and it shows that selecting problems with the lowest reasoning‑circuit engagement can outperform random selection on several medium‑difficulty benchmarks. However, the benefit depends on domain, model scale, and reward conditions, indicating that data selection in this setting is regime‑dependent rather than a fixed ranking of problem quality.
By Zhuofan Chen, Ziqian Jiao, Yikai Cui, Zhixin Cai, Jun Bai, Wenge Rong
arXiv:2605.11467v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Reasoning models post-hoc rationalize answers they have already committed to internally, producing chains of *reasoning theater*: deliberativ...
By Swapnil Parekh, Naman Goyal
arXiv:2606. 19236v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards algorithms like GRPO have emerged as the dominant post-training paradigm for complex reasoning in LLMs, yet commonly suffer from policy entropy collapse during training.
By Haipeng Luo, Qingfeng Sun, Songli Wu, Can Xu, Wenfeng Deng, Han Hu, Yansong Tang