arXiv AI

Tandem Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

arXiv:2606. 28166v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has significantly improved the reasoning capability of large language models, reaching expert or even superhuman performance in domains such as competition math.

arXiv AI
Sep 7

CoSkill: Joint Reinforcement Learning of Reasoning and Meta-Skill Agents for Hierarchical Skill Evolution

CoSkill introduces a unified multi‑agent reinforcement learning framework that jointly trains a Reasoning Agent and a learnable Meta‑Skill Agent over a hierarchical skill library. By treating the meta‑skill workflow as a trainable agent and sharing a single backbone, CoSkill enables end‑to‑end co‑adaptation, allowing the Reasoning Agent to condition actions on retrieved task and step skills while the Meta‑Skill Agent refines those skills based on task performance. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop demonstrate that CoSkill outperforms prior skill‑based and RL baselines, achieving higher success rates and improved sample, asymptotic, and wall‑clock efficiency.

By Jinyuan Feng, Dongmin Li, Yiqun Chen, Yang Gao, Xing Chen, Huimu Wang, Zhiqiang Pu
arXiv AI
Sep 10

To Mix or To Merge: Toward Multi-Domain Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models

The paper investigates how to apply Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to large language models across multiple domains. It compares two training paradigms—mixed multi-task RLVR and separate RLVR followed by model merging—using tasks such as math, coding, science, instruction following, and agent. Experiments show that RLVR across domains causes minimal interference and that reasoning-intensive domains can synergize, with insights drawn from information constraints, prediction behavior, and self-verification.

By Haoqing Wang, Xiang Long, Ziheng Li, Yilong Xu, Tingguang Li, Yehui Tang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

RLVE: Scaling Up Reinforcement Learning for Language Models with Adaptive Verifiable Environments

arXiv:2511. 07317v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Reinforcement Learning (RL) with Adaptive Verifiable Environments (RLVE), an approach using verifiable environments that procedurally generate problems and provide algorithmically verifiable rewards, to scale up RL for language models (LMs).

By Zhiyuan Zeng, Hamish Ivison, Yiping Wang, Lifan Yuan, Shuyue Stella Li, Zhuorui Ye, Siting Li, Jacqueline He, Runlong Zhou, Tong Chen, Chenyang Zhao, Yulia Tsvetkov, Simon Shaolei Du, Natasha Jaques, Hao Peng, Pang Wei Koh, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
arXiv AI
Jun 19

Beyond Reasoning Gains: Mitigating General-Capability Forgetting in Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2510. 21978v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has delivered impressive gains in mathematical and multimodal reasoning and has become a standard post-training paradigm for contemporary language and vision-language models.

By Hoang Phan, Xianjun Yang, Yuanshun Yao, Jingyu Zhang, Shengjie Bi, Xiaocheng Tang, Madian Khabsa, Lijuan Liu, Deren Lei
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 Machine Learning
Sep 4

Gradients Know What Outcomes Don't: Unlocking Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning with Gradient-Aligned Rewards

The paper introduces Gradient-Aligned Reward (GAR), a reinforcement learning technique that uses truncated backpropagation to generate a compact gradient vector for each rollout and compares it to an expert-anchor gradient via cosine similarity. This dense, reasoning-aware reward improves large language model chain-of-thought reasoning on math benchmarks and transfers to other tasks without domain‑specific data, while adding less than 9% computational overhead. GAR outperforms existing baselines such as GRPO on Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B models.

By Leqi Zheng, Jinbo Su, Fang Niu, Chaokun Wang, Weiping Wang, Jiajun Zhang, Shannan Yan, Jie Wu, Zhaolu Kang, Rong Fu, Hang Zhang
arXiv AI
Jun 9

CLPO: Curriculum Learning meets Policy Optimization for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2509. 25004v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become an effective paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models, but most methods still optimize reasoning trajectories over the static problem set, wasting rollout budget on solved or overly difficult problems.

By Shijie Zhang, Zheng Xiao, Shiyu Liu, Guohao Sun, Kevin Zhang, Xiang Guo, Rujun Guo, Shaoyu Liu, Wangxiao Zhao, Guanjun Jiang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Boosting LLM Reasoning via Human-Inspired Reward Shaping

The paper introduces T2T (Thickening-to-Thinning), a dynamic reward framework for large language models that mimics human learning by separating exploration and consolidation phases. During incorrect attempts, T2T encourages exploration to broaden the search space, while after correct solutions it applies length penalties to promote concise reasoning. Experiments on mathematical benchmarks across five mainstream LLMs show that T2T outperforms standard GRPO and recent baselines, improving overall reasoning performance.

By Wenze Lin, Zhen Yang, Xitai Jiang, Xiaoteng Ma, Gao Huang