arXiv Machine Learning By Fengkai Yang, Zherui Chen, Xiaohan Wang, Xiaodong Lu, Jiajun Chai, Guojun Yin, Wei Lin, Shuai Ma, Fuzhen Zhuang, Deqing Wang, Yaodong Yang, Jianxin Li, Yikun Ban

Your Group-Relative Advantage Is Biased

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The paper examines the bias in group-relative advantage estimation used in reinforcement learning from verifier rewards (RLVR) for large language models. It shows that for binary rewards, hard prompts suffer from negative estimation errors while easy prompts have positive errors, leading to underweighting correct hard answers and insufficient penalties for incorrect easy answers. The authors propose History‑Aware Adaptive Difficulty Weighting (HA‑DW), an adaptive reweighting scheme that corrects these biases, and demonstrate through theory and experiments on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks that HA‑DW improves performance when integrated into GRPO and its variants.

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