arXiv AI

ThinkPrior: Zero-Rollout Difficulty Priors for Cold-Start Prompt Selection in RLVR

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

Early Verdicts, Better Budgets: Sequential Adaptive Rollout Allocation for Compute-Efficient RLVR

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

LoRA Scaffolded Policy Optimization (LSPO): A Sampling-Time Low-Rank Scaffold for Recovering Reinforcement-Learning Gradient on Zero-Reward Cliff Prompts

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 Machine Learning
Jul 31

LoRA Scaffolded Policy Optimization (LSPO): A Sampling-Time Low-Rank Scaffold for Recovering Reinforcement-Learning Gradient on Zero-Reward Cliff Prompts

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 7

What pass@k Cannot Measure: Evaluating Diversity and Capability Retention after Post-Training

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 Machine Learning
Sep 10

CircuitLens: Reasoning Circuits as Data Selection Signals for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

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 AI
Jun 18

STARE: Surprisal-Guided Token-Level Advantage Reweighting for Policy Entropy Stability

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