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
The paper introduces Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) applied to small search agents, specifically training a Qwen3.5-0.8B model with Group Relative Policy Optimization and an interleaved Wikipedia-search tool on the MuSiQue dataset. Experiments varying reward shapes across three seeds show that RLVR can achieve a 3.8‑fold improvement over an untrained baseline, with the best run reaching a 0.352 average exact match. The study finds that the sparse exact‑match reward, standard in larger models, performs poorly for small models, indicating that reward design must be tailored rather than scaled down from large‑model recipes.
By Gaurisankar Jayadas, Aske Plaat, \'Alvaro Serra-G\'omez, Sandheep P
arXiv:2607. 02869v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving mathematical reasoning in language models.
By Anagha Radhakrishna Palandye, Rebecca Glick, Osheen Kaul
The paper introduces Jev, a reinforcement‑learning‑trained model that provides calibrated probability answers to typed questions about a single input in one call. Jev is evaluated on RLCDAlignBench, a benchmark covering ten alignment failures across 44 tests and five target models, achieving a median AUROC of 0.886 zero‑shot and outperforming supervised baselines on most tasks. The study shows that question wording has little impact, while contextual fields that encode labels are more influential, and that Jev matches human‑label agreement while being 63× cheaper than LLM‑judge scorers.
By Ruoqi Guo, Yi Liu, Gelei Deng, Yuekang Li, Lida Zhao, Yutao Wu, Simin Chen, Ying Zhang, Leo Yu Zhang
arXiv:2607. 11506v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) optimizes LLMs using sparse verifiable final-answer rewards.
By Xiaojian Liu, Han Xu, Jianqiang Xia, Zhixuan Li, Ke Xu, Yiwei Dai, Xinran Chen, Changwo Wu, Yuchen Li
arXiv:2608. 15445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a reward is correct on every training example yet consistent with more than one goal, a model can acquire an unintended one, a failure known as goal misgeneralization.
By Suyash Maniyar, Armaan Sandhu, Abhishek Mishra
arXiv:2607. 10139v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Selecting the correct answer from a pool of candidate reasoning chains is the engine of test-time scaling, yet the standard selectors each carry a cost: self-consistency inherits the errors of the single model it resamples, and trained reward models need labeled data and transfer poorly off-distribution.
By Ning Liu
JevAdvBench introduces the first adversarial benchmark for reinforcement‑learning‑based calibrated decision (RLCD) models, providing 812 typed questions across 66 scenarios and a black‑box attack suite of 9,744 single‑edit variants. The benchmark evaluates attacks by comparing each perturbed decision to the model’s own clean decision and to an identical re‑run, revealing that rewording changes decisions by only 1.2 percentage points while certain injected opinions can flip 12.1% of decisions and lower confidence below 0.8 in 38% of cases. These findings demonstrate that RLCD models can be significantly misled by seemingly innocuous input edits, underscoring the need to treat the state as untrusted in applications.
By Jianyi Hu, Hangtao Zhang, Yi Liu, Yeqi Zeng, Li Zeng, Xianlong Wang, Rui Wang, Leo Yu Zhang
arXiv:2605. 17333v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) typically samples multiple responses per prompt and assigns binary rewards based on individual correctness, yet the collective structure of the group output, specifically the distribution of errors, is largely discarded.
By Wenpu Liu, Yuqi Xu, Weichu Xie, Yongfu Zhu, Shuai Dong, Ziyue Wang, Wenqi Shao, Xiaoying Zhang, Tong Yang, Nan Duan, Jiaqi Wang
arXiv:2608.28771v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large reasoning models achieve strong performance on complex tasks by generating extended chain-of-thought (CoT) traces via reinforcement learning with...
By Xin Jiang, Minhao Wang, Wen Wu, Zhentao Xie, Shangheng Du, Jinxin Shi, Jiabao Zhao
arXiv:2607. 18006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models achieve strong reasoning performance, but often at prohibitive training cost - a challenge that is especially acute for compact models ($\leq 4 \, \mathrm{B}$ parameters) trained under limited budgets.
By Martino M. L. Pulici, Cuong Xuan Chu, Evgeny Kharlamov, Zifeng Ding, Volker Tresp, Yunpu Ma
arXiv:2608. 02181v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) for large language models typically trains its critic by mean-squared-error (MSE) regression on scalar value targets.
By Zhijian Zhou, Long Li, Xuan Zhang, Zongkai Liu, Yulei Qin, Ke Li, Xing Sun, Xiaoyu Tan, Chao Qu, Yuan Qi