arXiv AI

Unlearnable, or Unmeasured? On the Reliability of Difficulty Labels in RLVR

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

CircuitLens: Reasoning Circuits as Data Selection Signals for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

The Easy, the Hard, and the Learnable: Confidence and Difficulty-Adaptive Policy Optimization for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 07950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: RL with verifiable rewards can substantially improve LLM reasoning, yet standard GRPO-style training often treats easy, hard, and learnable questions alike through uniform sampling and weighting, leading to inefficient compute allocation.

By Zhanke Zhou, Xiangyu Lu, Chentao Cao, Brando Miranda, Tongliang Liu, Bo Han, Sanmi Koyejo
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Efficient RLVR Scheduling via Graph-Structured Online Difficulty Estimation

Efficient RLVR Scheduling via Graph-Structured Online Difficulty Estimation proposes a plug‑and‑play graph‑based online difficulty estimator for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). The method constructs a difficulty‑aware sample graph using semantic and reasoning similarities, introduces latent difficulty states with a Potts prior, aggregates rollout outcomes with a state‑level Beta‑Binomial model, and updates these estimates online via a mean‑field variational algorithm. This framework can be integrated into sample‑selection and rollout‑allocation schedulers, enabling difficulty‑adaptive exploration without dedicated probing and achieving better performance across multiple base models, RL schedulers, and benchmarks.

By Zhizhao Liu, Zhiliang Tian, Xi Wang, Zhihua Wen, Yihang Xiong, Zhiquan Lai, Dongsheng Li