arXiv AI By Zehao Wang, Hanzhu Chen, Runquan Gui, Zhe Wang, Lin Yang

When All Rollouts Fail: Policy-Compatible Joint Decoding for Hard-Problem Reasoning

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The paper introduces Policy-Compatible Reinforcement Learning (PICO), a method that addresses the learning cliff in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) by performing distribution-constrained joint decoding. PICO guides token-level decoding with expert data while preserving the model’s token probabilities, and uses a dynamic top‑k mechanism to keep sampling within a finite divergence budget. The resulting trajectories are verified and policy‑compatible, and are jointly optimized with on‑policy rollouts using a mixed‑behavior objective that mitigates distribution mismatch via importance sampling, leading to consistent performance gains over standard RLVR and prior off‑policy baselines on diverse reasoning datasets and agentic benchmarks.

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The paper introduces Policy-Compatible Reinforcement Learning (PICO), a method that combines distribution-constrained joint decoding with on-policy rollouts to address the learning cliff in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). PICO guides token-level decoding using expert data while preserving the model’s relative token probabilities, and employs a dynamic top‑k mechanism to keep sampling within a finite divergence budget. This approach yields verified, policy‑compatible trajectories that are jointly optimized with on‑policy rollouts, leading to consistent performance gains over standard RLVR and prior off‑policy baselines across diverse reasoning datasets and agentic benchmarks.

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