arXiv AI

AdaC-GRPO: Towards Mastering Long-Horizon Visual Sudoku Puzzles via Adaptive Curriculum Learning

AdaC-GRPO introduces an adaptive curriculum learning framework for mastering long-horizon visual Sudoku puzzles, a multimodal task that challenges large language models with multi-step deductive reasoning. The authors present FG-Sudoku, a fine-grained benchmark that categorizes puzzles by grid size and required deductive steps, revealing that frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with complex long-range dependencies. AdaC-GRPO dynamically constructs training batches by tracking the model’s Zone of Proximal Development through online rollout accuracy, enabling Qwen2.5-VL-7B to close a significant portion of the accuracy gap to Gemini-2.5-Pro and demonstrating generalizability across other models.

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
Oct 2

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 AI
Oct 5

Goldilocks RL: Tuning Task Difficulty to Escape Sparse Rewards for Reasoning

Goldilocks RL proposes an adaptive data‑selection strategy for reinforcement learning in language models, using a Selector network to predict reward variability and prioritize questions that are neither too easy nor too hard. By continuously adapting to the model’s evolving abilities, Goldilocks improves training efficiency on large‑scale reasoning datasets, achieving up to 78% fewer optimization steps compared to standard GRPO. The approach addresses the sample‑inefficiency problem of sparse rewards in reasoning tasks.

By Ilia Mahrooghi, Aryo Lotfi, Emmanuel Abbe
arXiv AI
Oct 15

Verifiable Process Rewards for Agentic Reasoning

The paper introduces Verifiable Process Rewards (VPR), a framework that uses symbolic or algorithmic task-solving oracles as action-level verifiers to provide dense rewards for intermediate actions in agentic reasoning tasks. VPR is applied to Sokoban, Sudoku, and Minesweeper, and improves policy performance over outcome-reward baselines. The authors also demonstrate VPR’s effectiveness in a tool‑use benchmark, highlighting its reliance on reliable task oracles and the difficulty of extending it to less structured environments.

By Huining Yuan, Zelai Xu, Huaijie Wang, Xiangmin Yi, Jiaxuan Gao, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Yu Wang, Chao Yu, Yi Wu
arXiv AI
Jun 8

Teaching the Way, Not the Answer: Privileged Tutoring Distillation for Multimodal Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606. 07000v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent post-training methods, particularly Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), have significantly enhanced the reasoning ability of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs).

By Shizhe Xiang, Ke An, Wenlong Yu, Yue Liu, Jian Luan, Pei Fu, Qilong Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 11

How Much Backtracking is Enough? Exploring the Interplay of SFT and RL in Enhancing LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2505. 24273v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) suggest that reinforcement learning (RL) effectively internalizes search strategies, yielding significant improvements on challenging reasoning tasks through extended chains of thought.

By Hongyi James Cai, Junlin Wang, Xiaoyin Chen, Bhuwan Dhingra