6arXiv cs.CL (Computation and Language)·
SCOPE-RL framework densifies reward signals in RLVR to improve reasoning accuracy and token efficiency
SCOPE-RL introduces a two-stage reinforcement learning framework that addresses sparse reward limitations in RLVR by adding prefix-decomposed sub-question rewards before success and correctness-gated process-shape rewards after success. Applied to Qwen3-8B-Instruct on math reasoning datasets, the method improves average accuracy by up to 11.2 percentage points and reduces reasoning tokens by up to 27.1% over outcome-only GRPO. The gains generalize across GSPO and a smaller Qwen3-0.6B model, suggesting reward-signal densification is broadly complementary to existing RLVR advances. Code and data are publicly released.
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POW3R: Policy-Aware Rubric Rewards for More Efficient RLVR Training
This paper identifies a failure mode in rubric-based reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR): static aggregation of criterion weights conflates human-assigned importance with current optimization utility, causing many criteria to be either already saturated or unreachable. The authors introduce POW3R, a framework that dynamically reweights criterion-level rewards during training using rollout-level contrast to emphasize criteria that currently differentiate policy outputs. Across three base policies and two datasets (multimodal and text-only), POW3R wins 24 of 30 comparisons on rubric reward and strict completion metrics, and reaches equivalent performance in 2.5–4× fewer training steps than vanilla GRPO with rubric rewards.
ExpRL: RL-based mid-training using human QA data as reward scaffolds for LLM reasoning
ExpRL proposes an automated approach to LLM mid-training that replaces manually curated reasoning traces with large corpora of human-written QA data used as reward scaffolds rather than imitation targets. Reference solutions are hidden from the policy and used only to construct problem-specific grading rubrics, enabling dense process-level rewards that reinforce partial progress and intermediate reasoning steps. On challenging math reasoning benchmarks, ExpRL outperforms SFT, sparse-reward GRPO, and self-distillation as an RL initialization strategy, with additional mixed-domain experiments suggesting broader applicability.
ACPO: Adaptive Clip Policy Optimization improves RLVR training for LLM reasoning
A new arXiv preprint provides theoretical analysis of Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) updates, identifying off-policy degree and gradient expectation as key factors governing update dynamics. The authors show that differences in gradient steps per rollout substantially affect importance sampling ratio distributions and which tokens dominate updates. Based on this analysis, they propose Adaptive Clip Policy Optimization (ACPO), which adjusts clipping boundaries per token group by empirical variance of importance sampling ratios, outperforming DAPO and CISPO baselines on 3B and 7B models across math, tabular QA, and logic benchmarks.
QwQ-32B: Scaling Reinforcement Learning for Enhanced Reasoning
Alibaba's Qwen team releases QwQ-32B, a 32-billion parameter model trained with scaled Reinforcement Learning to improve reasoning capabilities beyond conventional pretraining and post-training methods. The release draws explicit comparison to DeepSeek R1's cold-start and multi-stage RL training approach. The model is available via Qwen Chat, Hugging Face, ModelScope, and a demo interface. This represents Qwen's exploration of RL scalability as a path to enhanced LLM intelligence.
SCOPE: Self-Play via Co-Evolving Policies for Open-Ended Tasks
SCOPE is a data-free self-play framework for training language models on open-ended tasks without external supervision or frontier-model judges. It co-evolves two policies—a Challenger that generates document-grounded tasks and a Solver that answers via multi-turn retrieval—using a frozen copy of the initial model as a self-judge that writes task-specific rubrics. Across three 7-8B models (Qwen2.5, Qwen3, OLMo-3), SCOPE achieves up to +10.4 points on eight open-ended benchmarks and +13.8 points on seven held-out short-form QA benchmarks, matching or exceeding GRPO trained on ~9K curated prompts. Ablations identify rubric generation quality as the primary bottleneck for self-judging.
QUBRIC: Co-designing queries and rubrics for RL beyond verifiable rewards
QUBRIC is a framework that jointly optimizes queries and rubrics for reinforcement learning in settings where rewards are not strictly verifiable. The approach uses teacher-derived key points to rewrite open-ended queries into evaluable scenarios, applies contrastive rubric generation to capture teacher-policy gaps, and filters for learnability before GRPO training. Trained only on instruction-following data, QUBRIC achieves a +5.5 point gain on ArenaHard over an SFT baseline and transfers to legal, moral, and narrative reasoning benchmarks (+6.3 points average), suggesting rubric-based RL can complement RLVR in non-verifiable domains.
RiVER framework enables RL training of LLMs on tasks without ground-truth solutions
Researchers introduce RiVER (Ranking-induced VERifiable framework), a reinforcement learning approach that trains LLMs on score-based optimization tasks using deterministic execution feedback as continuous rewards, without requiring ground-truth answers. The method addresses two failure modes in group-relative RL with continuous rewards—scale dominance and frequency dominance—via calibrated, instance-wise reward shaping. Applied to Qwen3-8B and GLM-Z1-9B-0414 on competitive programming tasks, RiVER improves ALE rating rank by ~9% and also transfers to exact-solution benchmarks (LiveCodeBench, USACO) with 2-4% absolute gains, unlike raw-score baselines. The result suggests score-based heuristic tasks can serve as general-purpose RL training environments for coding ability.
Qwen2.5-Math Process Reward Model for Mathematical Reasoning Supervision
Alibaba's Qwen team introduces a process reward model (PRM) aimed at improving the reliability of mathematical reasoning in LLMs by supervising intermediate reasoning steps rather than only final answers. The work addresses the problem of models producing plausible but flawed intermediate derivations even when reaching correct conclusions. The release includes model weights on HuggingFace and ModelScope alongside a GitHub repository.