LongRLVR: Long-Context Reinforcement Learning Requires Verifiable Context Rewards

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02146v1
• Date: Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:07:53 GMT
• Title: LongRLVR: Long-Context Reinforcement Learning Requires Verifiable Context Rewards
• Authors: Guanzheng Chen, Michael Qizhe Shieh, Lidong Bing,
• Abstract summary: We introduce LongRLVR to augment the sparse answer reward with a dense and verifiable context reward.<n>This auxiliary signal directly incentivizes the model for selecting the correct grounding information.<n>LongRLVR consistently and significantly outperforms the standard RLVR across all models and benchmarks.
• Score: 51.45138356629732
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by optimizing them against factual outcomes. However, this paradigm falters in long-context scenarios, as its reliance on internal parametric knowledge is ill-suited for tasks requiring contextual grounding--the ability to find and reason over externally provided information. We identify a key reason for this failure: a reward based solely on the final answer is too sparse to effectively guide the model for identifying relevant evidence. We formally prove that the outcome-only reward leads to significant vanishing gradients for the context grounding process, rendering learning intractable. To overcome this bottleneck, we introduce LongRLVR to augment the sparse answer reward with a dense and verifiable context reward. This auxiliary signal directly incentivizes the model for selecting the correct grounding information, providing a robust learning gradient that solves the underlying optimization challenge. We validate our method on challenging long-context benchmarks using Qwen and LLaMA models. LongRLVR consistently and significantly outperforms the standard RLVR across all models and benchmarks, e.g., boosting a 14B model's scores on RULER-QA from 73.17 to 88.90 and on LongBench v2 from 39.8 to 46.5. Our work demonstrates that explicitly rewarding the grounding process is a critical and effective strategy for unlocking the full reasoning potential of LLMs in long-context applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/real-absolute-AI/LongRLVR.

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