Learning to Explore with Parameter-Space Noise: A Deep Dive into Parameter-Space Noise for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02555v1
• Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2026 13:10:30 GMT
• Title: Learning to Explore with Parameter-Space Noise: A Deep Dive into Parameter-Space Noise for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards
• Abstract summary: PSN-RLVR perturbs policy parameters before rollout generation to induce temporally consistent, trajectory-level exploration.<n>We propose a computationally efficient real-time adaptive noise scheduler driven by a lightweight surrogate that combines semantic diversity with normalized self-certainty.
• Score: 16.22162269278471
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves LLM reasoning, yet growing evidence indicates an exploration ceiling: it often reweights existing solution traces rather than discovering new strategies, limiting gains under large sampling budgets (e.g., pass-at-256). We address this limitation with PSN-RLVR, which perturbs policy parameters before rollout generation to induce temporally consistent, trajectory-level exploration that better preserves long-horizon chain-of-thought coherence than action-space noise. To mitigate the resulting sampling-update mismatch, we incorporate truncated importance sampling (TIS). To avoid expensive KL-based adaptive noise control, we propose a computationally efficient real-time adaptive noise scheduler driven by a lightweight surrogate that combines semantic diversity with normalized self-certainty. Instantiated on GRPO, a widely used RLVR method, PSN-GRPO consistently expands the effective reasoning capability boundary across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks and model families, yielding higher pass-at-k under large sampling budgets and outperforming prior exploration-oriented RLVR methods (e.g., Pass-at-k-style training) while remaining orthogonal and thus composable for additional gains.

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