Nudging Beyond the Comfort Zone: Efficient Strategy-Guided Exploration for RLVR

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15726v1
• Date: Fri, 15 May 2026 08:22:59 GMT
• Title: Nudging Beyond the Comfort Zone: Efficient Strategy-Guided Exploration for RLVR
• Abstract summary: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a scalable paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models.<n>We propose NudgeRL, a framework for structured and diversity-driven exploration in RLVR.<n>Our approach introduces Strategy Nudging, which conditions each rollout on lightweight, strategy-level contexts.
• Score: 53.27792011950384
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a scalable paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, its effectiveness is fundamentally limited by exploration: the policy can only improve on trajectories it has already sampled. While increasing the number of rollouts alleviates this issue, such brute-force scaling is computationally expensive, and existing approaches that modify the optimization objective provide limited control over what is explored. In this work, we propose NudgeRL, a framework for structured and diversity-driven exploration in RLVR. Our approach introduces Strategy Nudging, which conditions each rollout on lightweight, strategy-level contexts to induce diverse reasoning trajectories without relying on expensive oracle supervision. To effectively learn from such structured exploration, we further propose a unified objective, which decomposes the reward signal into inter- and intra-context components and incorporates a distillation objective to transfer discovered behaviors back to the base policy. Empirically, NudgeRL outperforms standard GRPO with up to 8 times larger rollout budgets, while outperforming oracle-guided RL baseline on average across five challenging math benchmarks. These results demonstrate that structured, context-driven exploration can serve as an efficient and scalable alternative to both brute-force rollout scaling and feasibility-oriented methods based on privileged information. Our code is available at https://github.com/tally0818/NudgeRL.

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