GIANTS-4B, trained with RL on a new 17k-example benchmark of parent-to-child paper insights, achieves 34% relative improvement over gemini-3-pro in LM-judge similarity and is rated higher-impact by a citation predictor.
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Does Reinforcement Learning Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?
56 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
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abstract
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently demonstrated notable success in enhancing the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), particularly on mathematics and programming tasks. Similar to how traditional RL helps agents explore and learn new strategies, RLVR is believed to enable LLMs to continuously self-improve, thus acquiring novel reasoning abilities beyond those of the corresponding base models. In this study we critically examine the current state of RLVR by systematically probing the reasoning capability boundaries of RLVR-trained LLMs across various model families, RL algorithms, and math, coding, and visual reasoning benchmarks, using pass@k at large k values as the evaluation metric. Surprisingly, we find that the current training setup does not elicit fundamentally new reasoning patterns. While RLVR-trained models outperform their base models at small k (e.g., k = 1), the base models achieve a higher pass@k score when k is large. Coverage and perplexity analyses show that the observed reasoning abilities originate from and are bounded by the base model. Treating the base model as an upper bound, our quantitative analysis shows that six popular RLVR algorithms perform similarly and remain far from optimal in leveraging the potential of the base model. By contrast, we find that distillation can introduce new reasoning patterns from the teacher and genuinely expand the model's reasoning capabilities. Overall, our findings suggest that current RLVR methods have not yet realized the potential of RL to elicit truly novel reasoning abilities in LLMs. This highlights the need for improved RL paradigms, such as continual scaling and multi-turn agent-environment interaction, to unlock this potential.
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- abstract Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently demonstrated notable success in enhancing the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), particularly on mathematics and programming tasks. Similar to how traditional RL helps agents explore and learn new strategies, RLVR is believed to enable LLMs to continuously self-improve, thus acquiring novel reasoning abilities beyond those of the corresponding base models. In this study we critically examine the current state of RLVR by systematically probing the reasoning capability boundaries of RLVR-trained LLMs across va
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The Divergent Remote Association Test (DRAT) is the first creativity test that significantly predicts LLMs' scientific ideation ability, unlike prior tests such as DAT or RAT.
ActGuide-RL uses human action data as plan-style guidance in mixed-policy RL to overcome exploration barriers in LLM agents, matching SFT+RL performance on search benchmarks without cold-start training.
StepCodeReasoner aligns code reasoning with verifiable stepwise execution traces via print anchors and bi-level GRPO reinforcement learning, reaching SOTA results on CRUXEval (91.1%) and LiveCodeBench (86.5%) for a 7B model.
SeePhys Pro benchmark reveals multimodal models degrade on physics reasoning as information transfers from text to images, with blind training improvements often stemming from textual cues rather than visual evidence.
HORA adaptively allocates rollouts using hit utility to improve Pass@K over compute-matched GRPO on math reasoning benchmarks while preserving Pass@1.
POPO uses bounded importance sampling on positive rollouts and a siamese policy network to achieve implicit negative gradients and stable optimization, matching or exceeding GRPO on math benchmarks such as 36.67% on AIME 2025.
ResRL decouples shared semantics between positive and negative responses in LLM reinforcement learning via SVD-based projection residuals, outperforming baselines including NSR by up to 9.4% on math reasoning benchmarks.
Render-in-the-Loop reformulates SVG generation as a step-wise visual-context-aware process using self-feedback from rendered intermediate states, VSF training, and RaV inference to outperform baselines on MMSVGBench for Text-to-SVG and Image-to-SVG.
Small 7B reasoning models were fine-tuned on synthetic and curated QFT problems using RL and SFT, yielding performance gains, error analysis, and public release of data and traces.
SUPERNOVA adapts instruction-tuning data for RLVR and achieves up to 52.8% relative gains on general reasoning benchmarks like BBEH through targeted task selection and mixing.
Reference-sampled weighted SFT with prompt-normalized Boltzmann weights induces the same policy as fixed-reference KL-regularized RLVR, with BOLT as the estimator and a finite one-shot error decomposition separating coverage, variance, and other terms.
NPO uses a policy's own near-future checkpoint as auxiliary trajectories to maximize effective learning signal S = Q/V, improving performance from 57.88 to 63.15 on Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct with GRPO while accelerating convergence.
GFT uses group advantage learning and dynamic coefficient rectification to fix reward sparsity and optimization instability in SFT for LLMs, yielding better policies than standard SFT.
Policy entropy remains constant in flow-matching models during RLHF due to fixed noise schedules while perceptual diversity collapses from mode-seeking policy gradients, so perceptual entropy constraints are introduced to preserve diversity and improve quality.
DARE co-evolves difficulty estimation and policy in RL for LLMs to improve training efficiency, final performance, and inference speed by using tailored strategies for different difficulty levels.
AIPO trains LLMs to expand their reasoning capability boundary via active multi-agent interaction with Verify, Knowledge, and Reasoning agents during RLVR, using importance sampling and clipping to handle feedback, then drops the agents at inference.
Group-mean centering in binary-reward GRPO produces gradient starvation; the fixed sign advantage A=2r-1 raises GSM8K accuracy from 28.4% to 73.8% at group size 4.
HTPO introduces hierarchical token-level objective control in RLVR to balance exploration and exploitation by grouping tokens according to difficulty, correctness, and entropy, yielding up to 8.6% gains on AIME benchmarks over DAPO.
ICR creates a virtual shorter distribution from shortest correct on-policy responses to regularize RL post-training toward concise yet accurate reasoning, improving the accuracy-length Pareto frontier on math and knowledge benchmarks.
RL for LLM reasoning acts as sparse policy selection at high-entropy tokens already present in the base model, enabling ReasonMaxxer—an efficient contrastive method that recovers most RL gains at three orders of magnitude lower cost.
CoRD uses collaborative multi-teacher step-wise decoding with perplexity-guided beam search to generate higher-quality Long-CoT data that lets smaller models reach near-teacher performance with less supervision.
Adaptive Unlearning suppresses package hallucinations in code-generating LLMs by 81% while preserving benchmark performance, using model-generated data and no human labels.
DDRL reduces spurious reward noise in test-time RL for math by excluding ambiguous samples, using fixed advantages, and adding consensus-based updates, outperforming prior TTRL methods on math benchmarks.
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GIANTS: Generative Insight Anticipation from Scientific Literature
GIANTS-4B, trained with RL on a new 17k-example benchmark of parent-to-child paper insights, achieves 34% relative improvement over gemini-3-pro in LM-judge similarity and is rated higher-impact by a citation predictor.
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Assessing the Creativity of Large Language Models: Testing, Limits, and New Frontiers
The Divergent Remote Association Test (DRAT) is the first creativity test that significantly predicts LLMs' scientific ideation ability, unlike prior tests such as DAT or RAT.
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Learning Agentic Policy from Action Guidance
ActGuide-RL uses human action data as plan-style guidance in mixed-policy RL to overcome exploration barriers in LLM agents, matching SFT+RL performance on search benchmarks without cold-start training.
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StepCodeReasoner: Aligning Code Reasoning with Stepwise Execution Traces via Reinforcement Learning
StepCodeReasoner aligns code reasoning with verifiable stepwise execution traces via print anchors and bi-level GRPO reinforcement learning, reaching SOTA results on CRUXEval (91.1%) and LiveCodeBench (86.5%) for a 7B model.
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SeePhys Pro: Diagnosing Modality Transfer and Blind-Training Effects in Multimodal RLVR for Physics Reasoning
SeePhys Pro benchmark reveals multimodal models degrade on physics reasoning as information transfers from text to images, with blind training improvements often stemming from textual cues rather than visual evidence.
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Where to Spend Rollouts: Hit-Utility Optimal Rollout Allocation for Group-Based RLVR
HORA adaptively allocates rollouts using hit utility to improve Pass@K over compute-matched GRPO on math reasoning benchmarks while preserving Pass@1.
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Beyond Negative Rollouts: Positive-Only Policy Optimization with Implicit Negative Gradients
POPO uses bounded importance sampling on positive rollouts and a siamese policy network to achieve implicit negative gradients and stable optimization, matching or exceeding GRPO on math benchmarks such as 36.67% on AIME 2025.
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ResRL: Boosting LLM Reasoning via Negative Sample Projection Residual Reinforcement Learning
ResRL decouples shared semantics between positive and negative responses in LLM reinforcement learning via SVD-based projection residuals, outperforming baselines including NSR by up to 9.4% on math reasoning benchmarks.
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Render-in-the-Loop: Vector Graphics Generation via Visual Self-Feedback
Render-in-the-Loop reformulates SVG generation as a step-wise visual-context-aware process using self-feedback from rendered intermediate states, VSF training, and RaV inference to outperform baselines on MMSVGBench for Text-to-SVG and Image-to-SVG.
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Fine-Tuning Small Reasoning Models for Quantum Field Theory
Small 7B reasoning models were fine-tuned on synthetic and curated QFT problems using RL and SFT, yielding performance gains, error analysis, and public release of data and traces.
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SUPERNOVA: Eliciting General Reasoning in LLMs with Reinforcement Learning on Natural Instructions
SUPERNOVA adapts instruction-tuning data for RLVR and achieves up to 52.8% relative gains on general reasoning benchmarks like BBEH through targeted task selection and mixing.
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Reference-Sampled Boltzmann Projection for KL-Regularized RLVR: Target-Matched Weighted SFT, Finite One-Shot Gaps, and Policy Mirror Descent
Reference-sampled weighted SFT with prompt-normalized Boltzmann weights induces the same policy as fixed-reference KL-regularized RLVR, with BOLT as the estimator and a finite one-shot error decomposition separating coverage, variance, and other terms.
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Near-Future Policy Optimization
NPO uses a policy's own near-future checkpoint as auxiliary trajectories to maximize effective learning signal S = Q/V, improving performance from 57.88 to 63.15 on Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct with GRPO while accelerating convergence.
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GFT: From Imitation to Reward Fine-Tuning with Unbiased Group Advantages and Dynamic Coefficient Rectification
GFT uses group advantage learning and dynamic coefficient rectification to fix reward sparsity and optimization instability in SFT for LLMs, yielding better policies than standard SFT.
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When Policy Entropy Constraint Fails: Preserving Diversity in Flow-based RLHF via Perceptual Entropy
Policy entropy remains constant in flow-matching models during RLHF due to fixed noise schedules while perceptual diversity collapses from mode-seeking policy gradients, so perceptual entropy constraints are introduced to preserve diversity and improve quality.
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DARE: Difficulty-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning with Co-Evolved Difficulty Estimation
DARE co-evolves difficulty estimation and policy in RL for LLMs to improve training efficiency, final performance, and inference speed by using tailored strategies for different difficulty levels.
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AIPO: : Learning to Reason from Active Interaction
AIPO trains LLMs to expand their reasoning capability boundary via active multi-agent interaction with Verify, Knowledge, and Reasoning agents during RLVR, using importance sampling and clipping to handle feedback, then drops the agents at inference.
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Gradient Starvation in Binary-Reward GRPO: Why Group-Mean Centering Fails and Why the Simplest Fix Works
Group-mean centering in binary-reward GRPO produces gradient starvation; the fixed sign advantage A=2r-1 raises GSM8K accuracy from 28.4% to 73.8% at group size 4.
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HTPO: Towards Exploration-Exploitation Balanced Policy Optimization via Hierarchical Token-level Objective Control
HTPO introduces hierarchical token-level objective control in RLVR to balance exploration and exploitation by grouping tokens according to difficulty, correctness, and entropy, yielding up to 8.6% gains on AIME benchmarks over DAPO.
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Implicit Compression Regularization: Concise Reasoning via Internal Shorter Distributions in RL Post-Training
ICR creates a virtual shorter distribution from shortest correct on-policy responses to regularize RL post-training toward concise yet accurate reasoning, improving the accuracy-length Pareto frontier on math and knowledge benchmarks.
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Rethinking RL for LLM Reasoning: It's Sparse Policy Selection, Not Capability Learning
RL for LLM reasoning acts as sparse policy selection at high-entropy tokens already present in the base model, enabling ReasonMaxxer—an efficient contrastive method that recovers most RL gains at three orders of magnitude lower cost.
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Distilling Long-CoT Reasoning through Collaborative Step-wise Multi-Teacher Decoding
CoRD uses collaborative multi-teacher step-wise decoding with perplexity-guided beam search to generate higher-quality Long-CoT data that lets smaller models reach near-teacher performance with less supervision.
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LLM Ghostbusters: Surgical Hallucination Suppression via Adaptive Unlearning
Adaptive Unlearning suppresses package hallucinations in code-generating LLMs by 81% while preserving benchmark performance, using model-generated data and no human labels.
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Understanding and Mitigating Spurious Signal Amplification in Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for Math Reasoning
DDRL reduces spurious reward noise in test-time RL for math by excluding ambiguous samples, using fixed advantages, and adding consensus-based updates, outperforming prior TTRL methods on math benchmarks.
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Infection-Reasoner: A Compact Vision-Language Model for Wound Infection Classification with Evidence-Grounded Clinical Reasoning
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Lightning OPD: Efficient Post-Training for Large Reasoning Models with Offline On-Policy Distillation
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Calibration-Aware Policy Optimization for Reasoning LLMs
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When Verification Fails: How Compositionally Infeasible Claims Escape Rejection
AI claim verification models rely on salient-constraint shortcuts instead of full compositional reasoning under the closed-world assumption, as revealed by their over-acceptance of claims with supported salient constraints but contradicted non-salient ones.
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When to Trust Tools? Adaptive Tool Trust Calibration For Tool-Integrated Math Reasoning
ATTC reduces 'Tool Ignored' errors in tool-integrated reasoning by adaptively trusting tool results according to generated code confidence, yielding 4.1-7.5% gains across models and datasets.
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The Master Key Hypothesis: Unlocking Cross-Model Capability Transfer via Linear Subspace Alignment
The Master Key Hypothesis states that capabilities are low-dimensional directions transferable across models through linear subspace alignment, with UNLOCK demonstrating gains such as 12.1% accuracy improvement on MATH when transferring CoT from 14B to 7B models.
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Vocabulary Dropout for Curriculum Diversity in LLM Co-Evolution
Vocabulary dropout prevents diversity collapse in LLM co-evolution by masking proposer logits, yielding average +4.4 point solver gains on mathematical reasoning benchmarks at 8B scale.
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Beyond the 80/20 Rule: High-Entropy Minority Tokens Drive Effective Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning
High-entropy minority tokens drive RLVR gains, so restricting gradients to the top 20% maintains or improves performance over full updates on Qwen3 models, especially larger ones.
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Too Correct to Learn: Reinforcement Learning on Saturated Reasoning Data
A parameter-free sampling strategy called CUTS combined with Mixed-CUTS training prevents mode collapse in RL for saturated LLM reasoning tasks and raises AIME25 Pass@1 accuracy by up to 15.1% over standard GRPO.
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HEALing Entropy Collapse: Enhancing Exploration in Few-Shot RLVR via Hybrid-Domain Entropy Dynamics Alignment
HEAL mitigates entropy collapse in few-shot RLVR by selectively adding general-domain data and aligning trajectory-level entropy dynamics, matching full-shot performance with 32 target samples.
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Characterizing Model-Native Skills
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SPS: Steering Probability Squeezing for Better Exploration in Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models
SPS interleaves RL and IRL to counteract probability squeezing in LLM reasoning trajectories, improving Pass@k on five benchmarks while identifying an empirical upper bound on multi-sample performance.
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Generalization in LLM Problem Solving: The Case of the Shortest Path
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Listen, Pause, and Reason: Toward Perception-Grounded Hybrid Reasoning for Audio Understanding
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InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency
InternVL3.5 advances open-source multimodal models with Cascade RL for +16% reasoning gains and ViR for 4x inference speedup, with the 241B model reaching SOTA among open-source MLLMs on multimodal, reasoning, and agentic tasks.
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How You Begin is How You Reason: Driving Exploration in RLVR via Prefix-Tuned Priors
IMAX trains soft prefixes with an InfoMax reward to drive diverse exploration in RLVR, yielding up to 11.60% gains in Pass@4 over standard RLVR across model scales.
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Mid-Training with Self-Generated Data Improves Reinforcement Learning in Language Models
Mid-training LLMs on self-generated diverse reasoning paths improves subsequent RL performance on mathematical benchmarks and OOD tasks.
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How Well Do LLMs Perform on the Simplest Long-Chain Reasoning Tasks: An Empirical Study on the Equivalence Class Problem
Non-reasoning LLMs fail the equivalence class problem while reasoning LLMs perform better but remain incomplete, with difficulty peaking at phase transition for the former and maximum diameter for the latter.
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On the Implicit Reward Overfitting and the Low-rank Dynamics in RLVR
RLVR exhibits implicit reward overfitting to training data and optimizes heavy-tailed singular spectra with rank-1 focus on reasoning capability.
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Rethinking Math Reasoning Evaluation: A Robust LLM-as-a-Judge Framework Beyond Symbolic Rigidity
An LLM-as-a-judge evaluation framework for math reasoning outperforms symbolic methods by accurately assessing diverse answer representations and formats.
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OGER: A Robust Offline-Guided Exploration Reward for Hybrid Reinforcement Learning
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StaRPO: Stability-Augmented Reinforcement Policy Optimization
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From Exposure to Internalization: Dual-Stream Calibration for In-context Clinical Reasoning
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Perceptual Flow Network for Visually Grounded Reasoning
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The Conversations Beneath the Code: Triadic Data for Long-Horizon Software Engineering Agents
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