arXiv AI

ISO: An RLVR-Native Optimization Stack

arXiv:2607. 19331v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is rapidly advancing the reasoning capabilities of language models, yet the optimization layer that converts reward feedback into weight-space updates remains poorly understood.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 26

RolloutPipe: Overlapping Pipelined Rollout and Training in Disaggregated On-Policy LLM Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 26997v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) post-training for reasoning increasingly relies on reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), where models learn from ground-truth feedback on mathematical, logical, and scientific tasks.

By Rongjian Chen, Jianmin Hu, Kejiang Ye, Minxian Xu
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Reinforcement Learning with Decomposed Subtasks

The paper introduces Reinforcement Learning with Decomposed Subtasks (RLDS), a method that splits trajectory rewards into per‑subtask shares before policy updates, replacing the scalar advantage used in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). RLDS employs Subtask‑Decomposed Advantage Estimation (SDAE) to compute group‑relative advantages and distribute credit to tokens based on subtask importance, focusing on steps where a reflection marks a subtask as consequential. Experiments on four benchmarks—FrozenLake, HotpotQA, ScienceWorld, and DeepResearch—show that RLDS improves performance on high‑heterogeneity tasks (ScienceWorld and FrozenLake) and is more compute‑efficient than scalar GRPO for long rollouts.

By Mattie Terzolo, Mikolaj Sacha, Ayan Sinha, Andrew Rabinovich
arXiv AI
Jun 18

Sparsity Curse: Understanding RLVR Model Parameter Space from Model Merging

arXiv:2606. 18521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm that surpasses Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) in eliciting reasoning intelligence and resisting catastrophic forgetting.

By Chenrui Wu, Zexi Li, Jiajun Bu, Jiangchuan Liu, Haishuai Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 2

Is One Layer Enough? Training A Single Transformer Layer Can Match Full-Parameter RL Training

arXiv:2607. 01232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central component of post-training large language models (LLMs), yet little is understood about how RL adaptation is distributed across transformer layers.

By Zijian Zhang, Rizhen Hu, Athanasios Glentis, Dawei Li, Chung-Yiu Yau, Hongzhou Lin, Mingyi Hong
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Weak-to-Strong Generalization via Direct On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2607. 05394v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a powerful recipe for improving language-model reasoning, but it is expensive to repeat on every new strong model because the target model must generate many rollouts during training.

By Shiyuan Feng, Huan-ang Gao, Haohan Chi, Hanlin Wu, Zhilong Zhang, Zheng Jiang, Bingxiang He, Wei-Ying Ma, Ya-Qin Zhang, Hao Zhou
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards for Small Search Agents

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