Scaf-GRPO: Scaffolded Group Relative Policy Optimization for Enhancing LLM Reasoning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19807v1
• Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2025 17:41:30 GMT
• Title: Scaf-GRPO: Scaffolded Group Relative Policy Optimization for Enhancing LLM Reasoning
• Authors: Xichen Zhang, Sitong Wu, Yinghao Zhu, Haoru Tan, Shaozuo Yu, Ziyi He, Jiaya Jia,
• Abstract summary: Scaf-GRPO is a training framework that intervenes when a model's independent learning has plateaued.<n>It boosts the pass@1 score of the Qwen2.5-Math-7B model by a relative 44.3% over a vanilla GRPO baseline.<n>This result demonstrates our framework provides a robust and effective methodology for unlocking a model's ability to solve problems previously beyond its reach.
• Score: 49.290631188365786
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these methods are fundamentally constrained by the ''learning cliff'' phenomenon: when faced with problems far beyond their current capabilities, models consistently fail, yielding a persistent zero-reward signal. In policy optimization algorithms like GRPO, this collapses the advantage calculation to zero, rendering these difficult problems invisible to the learning gradient and stalling progress. To overcome this, we introduce Scaf-GRPO (Scaffolded Group Relative Policy Optimization), a progressive training framework that strategically provides minimal guidance only when a model's independent learning has plateaued. The framework first diagnoses learning stagnation and then intervenes by injecting tiered in-prompt hints, ranging from abstract concepts to concrete steps, enabling the model to construct a valid solution by itself. Extensive experiments on challenging mathematics benchmarks demonstrate Scaf-GRPO's effectiveness, boosting the pass@1 score of the Qwen2.5-Math-7B model on the AIME24 benchmark by a relative 44.3% over a vanilla GRPO baseline. This result demonstrates our framework provides a robust and effective methodology for unlocking a model's ability to solve problems previously beyond its reach, a critical step towards extending the frontier of autonomous reasoning in LLM.

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