arXiv AI

Momentum for Reasoning: Dense Intrinsic Signals in Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606. 08815v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for eliciting long-chain reasoning in large language models.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

ConSteer-RL: Steering Reasoning Capabilities in Large Language Models via Confidence-Aware Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 08088v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently become a key paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it remains limited by sparse binary rewards and its ignorance of model-internal uncertainty.

By Qing Miao, Yiming Zhao, Jing Yang, Chenxi Liu, Yuehai Chen, Yuewen Liu, Shaoyi Du, Badong Chen
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
1d ago

Your Language Model is Its Own Critic: Reinforcement Learning with Value Estimation from Actor's Internal States

The paper introduces POISE, a reinforcement learning algorithm that uses a model’s internal states as a value estimator to reduce variance in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). By employing a lightweight probe that reads internal signals during the forward pass, POISE predicts baselines online and uses a cross‑rollout construction to keep gradients unbiased. Experiments on Qwen3‑4B and OLMo3‑7B‑Instruct‑DPO across six domains show POISE outperforms existing RLVR baselines, offering more stable training and a value model that generalizes across tasks and scales with the policy.

By Yunho Choi, Jongwon Lim, Woojin Ahn, Minjae Oh, Jeonghoon Shim, Yohan Jo
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Advantage Collapse in Group Relative Policy Optimization: Diagnosis and Mitigation

arXiv:2605. 21125v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a prominent algorithm within the Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) framework, has achieved strong results in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs).

By Xixiang He, Qiyao Sun, Ao Cheng, Xingming Li, Xuanyu Ji, Hailun Lu, Runke Huang, Qingyong Hu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

ExTra: Exploratory Trajectory Optimization for Language Model Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 24994v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for language-model reasoning can fail at both extremes of task difficulty: easy prompts often produce all-correct, low-diversity rollout groups with little gradient signal, while hard prompts can produce all-incorrect groups with no positive reward.

By Wenyang Hu, Junxiang Jia, Zhen Shu, Daniel Dahlmeier, See-Kiong Ng, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
arXiv AI
Jun 16

STRIDE: Strategic Trajectory Reasoning via Discriminative Estimation for Verifiable Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 15866v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become an effective post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models.

By Qinjian Zhao, Zhihao Dou, Dinggen Zhang, Xiangyu Li, Chaoda Song, Zhongwei Wan, Xinpeng Li, Yanyan Zhang, Kaijie Chen, Qingtao Pan, Chengcheng Feng, Zhiqiang Gao, Xiaoyu Xia