Selector-Guided Autonomous Curriculum for One-Shot Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01823v1
- Date: Sun, 03 May 2026 11:10:01 GMT
- Title: Selector-Guided Autonomous Curriculum for One-Shot Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards
- Abstract summary: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has been established as a highly effective technique for augmenting the math reasoning skills of Large Language Models (LLMs)<n>We propose a Selector-Guided Autonomous Curriculum (SGAC) approach, which employs a learnable selector model on a multi-dimensional feature space consisting of success probability, reward variance, output disagreementtropy, and semantic difficulty level, instead of the static reward variance.<n>Our framework is evaluated using the Hendrycks MATH benchmark, with the Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B model serving as the baseline.
- Score: 0.0
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
- Abstract: Recently, Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has been established as a highly effective technique for augmenting the math reasoning skills of Large Language Models (LLMs) based on a single instance. Current state-of-the-art 1-shot RLVR models adopt heuristics for selecting instances, mostly based on historical variance in rewards, which we find to be inherently misleading as a measure of transferability value. In this paper, we propose a Selector-Guided Autonomous Curriculum (SGAC) approach, which employs a learnable selector model on a multi-dimensional feature space consisting of success probability, reward variance, output disagreement (entropy), and semantic difficulty level, instead of the static reward variance heuristic. In our empirical evaluation on pools of candidate problems, we observed that output disagreement, rather than reward variance, is the strongest predictor of reasoning gains in subsequent iterations. Leveraging this finding, we develop an autonomous curriculum algorithm for dynamically siphoning candidate problems from a large pool, ranking them by the learned selector, and running micro-bursts of 1-shot GRPO. Our framework is evaluated using the Hendrycks MATH benchmark, with the Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B model serving as the baseline. Our framework obtains an accuracy of 68.0\% on the hold-out dataset, which is better than the accuracy obtained from the state-of-the-art model, 64.0\%, as well as the 1-shot RLVR checkpoint proposed by Wang et al., which achieved an accuracy of 66.0\%. The results confirm that entropy-based intelligent data curation leads to strict reasoning improvement over static training methods, particularly in severely limited data conditions.
Related papers
- CircuitLens: Reasoning Circuits as Data Selection Signals for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards [9.41727721095383]
Circuit Reasoning Score (CRS) is a selection signal derived from 46 reasoning-sensitive attention heads.<n>CRS runs against the intuitive hypothesis that stronger reasoning-circuit engagement produces better training data.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-09-07T08:14:26Z) - Better, Faster: Harnessing Self-Improvement in Large Reasoning Models [88.9107786925265]
We propose HSIR, which effectively Harnesses Self-Improvement in large Reasoning models via two simple-yet-effective approaches.<n>Specifically, HSIR introduces a verify-then-exit sampling strategy to mitigate data imbalance.<n>HSIR also designs an Intrinsic Diversity score to quantify overthinking and filter out the undesired solutions.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-05-24T10:54:46Z) - Rewards as Labels: Revisiting RLVR from a Classification Perspective [10.774056916074441]
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards has recently advanced the capabilities of Large Language Models in complex reasoning tasks.<n>We propose Rewards as Labels (REAL), a novel framework that revisits verifiable rewards as categorical labels rather than scalar weights.<n>Our analysis reveals that REAL induces a monotonic and bounded gradient weighting, enabling balanced gradient allocation across rollouts.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-02-05T13:11:36Z) - SPARK: Stepwise Process-Aware Rewards for Reference-Free Reinforcement Learning [39.1720897614261]
Process reward models (PRMs) that provide dense, step-level feedback have shown promise for reinforcement learning.<n>We propose SPARK: a three-stage framework where in the first stage a generator model produces diverse solutions and a verifier model evaluates them.<n>We show that aggregating multiple independent verifications at the step level produces training data for process reward models that surpass ground-truth outcome supervision.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-12-02T21:30:47Z) - A Mathematical Framework for Custom Reward Functions in Job Application Evaluation using Reinforcement Learning [0.8709142317087694]
This article describes a new two-step process to design a more refined resume evaluation model based on a small language model.<n>The model is finetuned using GRPO on a custom reward function.<n>Our resulting GRPO-polished model demonstrates significant real-world efficacy, achieving a final accuracy of 91% on unseen test data.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-11-20T06:06:30Z) - Reinforcing Video Reasoning with Focused Thinking [65.85683941058916]
We propose TW-GRPO, a novel framework that enhances visual reasoning with focused thinking and dense reward granularity.<n>Specifically, we employ a token weighting mechanism that prioritizes tokens with high informational density.<n>We also reformulate RL training by shifting from single-choice to multi-choice QA tasks.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-05-30T15:42:19Z) - Discriminative Policy Optimization for Token-Level Reward Models [55.98642069903191]
Process reward models (PRMs) provide more nuanced supervision compared to outcome reward models (ORMs)<n>Q-RM explicitly learns token-level Q-functions from preference data without relying on fine-grained annotations.<n>Reinforcement learning with Q-RM significantly enhances training efficiency, achieving convergence 12 times faster than ORM on GSM8K and 11 times faster than step-level PRM on MATH.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-05-29T11:40:34Z) - Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning in Large Language Models with One Training Example [117.86853102104256]
We show that reinforcement learning with verifiable reward using one training example (1-shot RLVR) is effective in incentivizing the math reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs)<n>We identify some interesting phenomena during 1-shot RLVR, including cross-category generalization, increased frequency of self-reflection, and sustained test performance improvement.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-04-29T09:24:30Z) - UncertaintyRAG: Span-Level Uncertainty Enhanced Long-Context Modeling for Retrieval-Augmented Generation [93.38604803625294]
We present UncertaintyRAG, a novel approach for long-context Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
We use Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR)-based span uncertainty to estimate similarity between text chunks.
UncertaintyRAG outperforms baselines by 2.03% on LLaMA-2-7B, achieving state-of-the-art results.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-10-03T17:39:38Z) - InfoRM: Mitigating Reward Hacking in RLHF via Information-Theoretic Reward Modeling [66.3072381478251]
Reward hacking, also termed reward overoptimization, remains a critical challenge.
We propose a framework for reward modeling, namely InfoRM, by introducing a variational information bottleneck objective.
We show that InfoRM's overoptimization detection mechanism is not only effective but also robust across a broad range of datasets.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-02-14T17:49:07Z) - Leveraging Uncertainty Estimates To Improve Classifier Performance [4.4951754159063295]
Binary classification involves predicting the label of an instance based on whether the model score for the positive class exceeds a threshold chosen based on the application requirements.
However, model scores are often not aligned with the true positivity rate.
This is especially true when the training involves a differential sampling across classes or there is distributional drift between train and test settings.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2023-11-20T12:40:25Z) - Value-Distributional Model-Based Reinforcement Learning [59.758009422067]
Quantifying uncertainty about a policy's long-term performance is important to solve sequential decision-making tasks.
We study the problem from a model-based Bayesian reinforcement learning perspective.
We propose Epistemic Quantile-Regression (EQR), a model-based algorithm that learns a value distribution function.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2023-08-12T14:59:19Z)
This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.
This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.