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Oct 28

SIRI: Scaling Iterative Reinforcement Learning with Interleaved Compression

We introduce SIRI, Scaling Iterative Reinforcement Learning with Interleaved Compression, a simple yet effective RL approach for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that enables more efficient and accurate reasoning. Existing studies have observed repetitive thinking patterns in LRMs, and attempts to reduce them often come at the cost of performance. In this paper, we show that this trade-off can be overcome through a training regime that iteratively alternates between compressing and expanding the reasoning budget, by dynamically adjusting the maximum rollout length during training. The compression phase cuts the rollout length, forcing the model to make precise and valuable decisions within a limited context, which effectively reduces redundant tokens and increases reasoning density. The expansion phase then relaxes the length limit, providing space for the model to explore and plan in long-horizon settings. Remarkably, we find that after each compression-expansion cycle, the model's performance improves even as its output length decreases, steadily pushing it closer to the Pareto frontier in the performance-efficiency trade-off. Training on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, SIRI-low improves performance on AIME24 by 43.2% while reducing token usage by 46.9% after three iterations, and SIRI-high achieves the highest accuracy compared to all other methods (Figure 1). Our findings shed light on the potential of periodically oscillating the LRM's output truncation length during training to dynamically balance exploration and efficiency in reasoning, converging towards an optimal "sweet spot" between the two. Our models are publicly available.

Thinking vs. Doing: Agents that Reason by Scaling Test-Time Interaction

The current paradigm of test-time scaling relies on generating long reasoning traces ("thinking" more) before producing a response. In agent problems that require interaction, this can be done by generating thinking traces before acting in the world. However, this process does not allow agents to acquire new information from the environment or adapt their behavior over time. In this work, we propose to scale test-time interaction, an untapped dimension of test-time scaling that increases the agent's interaction horizon to enable running rich behaviors such as exploration, backtracking, and dynamic re-planning within a single rollout. To demonstrate the promise of this scaling dimension, we study the domain of web agents. We first show that even prompting-based interaction scaling without any training can improve task success on web benchmarks non-trivially. Building on this, we introduce TTI (Test-Time Interaction), a curriculum-based online reinforcement learning (RL) approach that trains agents by adaptively adjusting their rollout lengths. Using a Gemma 3 12B model, TTI produces state-of-the-art open-source, open-data web agents on WebVoyager and WebArena benchmarks. We further show that TTI enables agents to balance exploration and exploitation adaptively. Our results establish interaction scaling as a powerful, complementary axis to scaling per-step compute, offering new avenues for training adaptive agents.

GRAPE: Generalizing Robot Policy via Preference Alignment

Despite the recent advancements of vision-language-action (VLA) models on a variety of robotics tasks, they suffer from critical issues such as poor generalizability to unseen tasks, due to their reliance on behavior cloning exclusively from successful rollouts. Furthermore, they are typically fine-tuned to replicate demonstrations collected by experts under different settings, thus introducing distribution bias and limiting their adaptability to diverse manipulation objectives, such as efficiency, safety, and task completion. To bridge this gap, we introduce GRAPE: Generalizing Robot Policy via Preference Alignment. Specifically, GRAPE aligns VLAs on a trajectory level and implicitly models reward from both successful and failure trials to boost generalizability to diverse tasks. Moreover, GRAPE breaks down complex manipulation tasks to independent stages and automatically guides preference modeling through customized spatiotemporal constraints with keypoints proposed by a large vision-language model. Notably, these constraints are flexible and can be customized to align the model with varying objectives, such as safety, efficiency, or task success. We evaluate GRAPE across a diverse array of tasks in both real-world and simulated environments. Experimental results demonstrate that GRAPE enhances the performance of state-of-the-art VLA models, increasing success rates on in-domain and unseen manipulation tasks by 51.79% and 60.36%, respectively. Additionally, GRAPE can be aligned with various objectives, such as safety and efficiency, reducing collision rates by 44.31% and rollout step-length by 11.15%, respectively. All code, models, and data are available at https://grape-vla.github.io/

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 28, 2024 2

LoongRL:Reinforcement Learning for Advanced Reasoning over Long Contexts

Reasoning over long contexts is essential for large language models. While reinforcement learning (RL) enhances short-context reasoning by inducing "Aha" moments in chain-of-thought, the advanced thinking patterns required for long-context reasoning remain largely unexplored, and high-difficulty RL data are scarce. In this paper, we introduce LoongRL, a data-driven RL method for advanced long-context reasoning. Central to LoongRL is KeyChain, a synthesis approach that transforms short multi-hop QA into high-difficulty long-context tasks by inserting UUID chains that hide the true question among large collections of distracting documents. Solving these tasks requires the model to trace the correct chain step-by-step, identify the true question, retrieve relevant facts and reason over them to answer correctly. RL training on KeyChain data induces an emergent plan-retrieve-reason-recheck reasoning pattern that generalizes far beyond training length. Models trained at 16K effectively solve 128K tasks without prohibitive full-length RL rollout costs. On Qwen2.5-7B and 14B, LoongRL substantially improves long-context multi-hop QA accuracy by +23.5% and +21.1% absolute gains. The resulting LoongRL-14B reaches a score of 74.2, rivaling much larger frontier models such as o3-mini (74.5) and DeepSeek-R1 (74.9). It also improves long-context retrieval, passes all 128K needle-in-a-haystack stress tests, and preserves short-context reasoning capabilities.

Staying in the Sweet Spot: Responsive Reasoning Evolution via Capability-Adaptive Hint Scaffolding

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has achieved remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing RLVR methods often suffer from exploration inefficiency due to mismatches between the training data's difficulty and the model's capability. LLMs fail to discover viable reasoning paths when problems are overly difficult, while learning little new capability when problems are too simple. In this work, we formalize the impact of problem difficulty by quantifying the relationship between loss descent speed and rollout accuracy. Building on this analysis, we propose SEELE, a novel supervision-aided RLVR framework that dynamically adjusts problem difficulty to stay within the high-efficiency region. SEELE augments each training sample by appending a hint (part of a full solution) after the original problem. Unlike previous hint-based approaches, SEELE deliberately and adaptively adjusts the hint length for each problem to achieve an optimal difficulty. To determine the optimal hint length, SEELE employs a multi-round rollout sampling strategy. In each round, it fits an item response theory model to the accuracy-hint pairs collected in preceding rounds to predict the required hint length for the next round. This instance-level, real-time difficulty adjustment aligns problem difficulty with the evolving model capability, thereby improving exploration efficiency. Experimental results show that SEELE outperforms Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) by +11.8 and +10.5 points, respectively, and surpasses the best previous supervision-aided approach by +3.6 points on average across six math reasoning benchmarks.

Efficient Multi-turn RL for GUI Agents via Decoupled Training and Adaptive Data Curation

Vision-language model (VLM) based GUI agents show promise for automating complex desktop and mobile tasks, but face significant challenges in applying reinforcement learning (RL): (1) slow multi-turn interactions with GUI environments for policy rollout, and (2) insufficient high-quality agent-environment interactions for policy learning. To address these challenges, we propose DART, a Decoupled Agentic RL Training framework for GUI agents, which coordinates heterogeneous modules in a highly decoupled manner. DART separates the training system into four asynchronous modules: environment cluster, rollout service, data manager, and trainer. This design enables non-blocking communication, asynchronous training, rollout-wise trajectory sampling, and per-worker model synchronization, significantly improving the system efficiency: 1.6*GPU utilization for rollout, 1.9* training throughput, and 5.5* environment utilization. To facilitate effective learning from abundant samples, we introduce an adaptive data curation scheme: (1) pre-collecting successful trajectories for challenging tasks to supplement sparse success in online sampling; (2) dynamically adjusting rollout numbers and trajectory lengths based on task difficulty; (3) training selectively on high-entropy steps to prioritize critical decisions; (4) stabilizing learning via truncated importance sampling for policy mismatch between policy rollout and updating. On the OSWorld benchmark, DART-GUI-7B achieves a 42.13% task success rate, a 14.61% absolute gain over the base model, and 7.34% higher than open-source SOTA. We will fully open-source our training framework, data, and model checkpoints via computer-use-agents.github.io/dart-gui, which we believe is a timely contribution to the open-source community of agentic RL training.

Depth-Breadth Synergy in RLVR: Unlocking LLM Reasoning Gains with Adaptive Exploration

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for unlocking reasoning capabilities in large language models, yet its full potential is hindered by two under-explored dimensions: Depth-the hardest problem a model can sample; Breadth-the number of instances consumed in a single iteration. We dissect the popular GRPO algorithm and reveal a systematic bias: the cumulative-advantage disproportionately weights samples with medium accuracy, while down-weighting the low-accuracy instances that are crucial for pushing reasoning boundaries. To rectify the depth neglect, we introduce Difficulty Adaptive Rollout Sampling (DARS), which re-weights hard problems through targeted multi-stage rollouts, thereby increasing the number of positive rollouts for hard problems. Empirically, naively enlarging rollout size only accelerates convergence and even hurts Pass@K. Our DARS, in contrast, delivers consistent Pass@K gains without extra inference cost at convergence. Just as we adaptively expanded the depth of exploration, we now ask whether aggressively scaling the breadth of training data can further amplify reasoning gains. To this end, we intensely scale batch size and replace PPO's mini-batch iterations with full-batch updates over multiple epochs. Increasing breadth significantly enhances Pass@1 performance. Large-breadth training sustains high token-level entropy, indicating continued exploration and reduced gradient noise. We further present DARS-B, which augments DARS with large breadth, and demonstrate simultaneous gains in Pass@K and Pass@1. The results confirm that breadth and adaptive exploration across depth operate as orthogonal dimensions in RLVR, which are key to unleashing the reasoning power of RLVR.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 19

DRPO: Efficient Reasoning via Decoupled Reward Policy Optimization

Recent large reasoning models (LRMs) driven by reinforcement learning algorithms (e.g., GRPO) have achieved remarkable performance on challenging reasoning tasks. However, these models suffer from overthinking, generating unnecessarily long and redundant reasoning even for simple questions, which substantially increases computational cost and response latency. While existing methods incorporate length rewards to GRPO to promote concise reasoning, they incur significant performance degradation. We identify the root cause: when rewards for correct but long rollouts are penalized, GRPO's group-relative advantage function can assign them negative advantages, actively discouraging valid reasoning. To overcome this, we propose Decoupled Reward Policy Optimization (DRPO), a novel framework that decouples the length-based learning signal of correct rollouts from incorrect ones. DRPO ensures that reward signals for correct rollouts are normalized solely within the positive group, shielding them from interference by negative samples. The DRPO's objective is grounded in integrating an optimized positive data distribution, which maximizes length-based rewards under a KL regularization, into a discriminative objective. We derive a closed-form solution for this distribution, enabling efficient computation of the objective and its gradients using only on-policy data and importance weighting. Of independent interest, this formulation is general and can incorporate other preference rewards of positive data beyond length. Experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks demonstrate DRPO's significant superiority over six efficient reasoning baselines. Notably, with a 1.5B model, our method achieves 77\% length reduction with only 1.1\% performance loss on simple questions like GSM8k dataset, while the follow-up baseline sacrifices 4.3\% for 68\% length reduction.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 6

BroRL: Scaling Reinforcement Learning via Broadened Exploration

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a key ingredient for unlocking complex reasoning capabilities in large language models. Recent work ProRL has shown promise in scaling RL by increasing the number of training steps. However, performance plateaus after thousands of steps, with clear diminishing returns from allocating more computation to additional training. In this work, we investigate a complementary paradigm for scaling RL, BroR-Lincreasing the number of rollouts per example to hundreds to exhaustively Broaden exploration, which yields continuous performance gains beyond the saturation point observed in ProRL when scaling the number of training steps. Our approach is motivated by a mass balance equation analysis allowing us to characterize the rate of change in probability mass for correct and incorrect tokens during the reinforcement process. We show that under a one-step RL assumption, sampled rollout tokens always contribute to correct-mass expansion, while unsampled tokens outside rollouts may lead to gains or losses depending on their distribution and the net reward balance. Importantly, as the number of rollouts per example N increases, the effect of unsampled terms diminishes, ensuring overall correct-mass expansion. To validate our theoretical analysis, we conduct simulations under more relaxed conditions and find that a sufficiently large rollout size N-corresponding to ample exploration-guarantees an increase in the probability mass of all correct tokens. Empirically, BroRL revives models saturated after 3K ProRL training steps and demonstrates robust, continuous improvement, achieving state-of-the-art results for the 1.5B model across diverse benchmarks.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Oct 1 2

Stable Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Reasoning

The success of Deepseek-R1 has drawn the LLM community's attention to reinforcement learning (RL) methods like GRPO. However, such rule-based 0/1 outcome reward methods lack the capability to regulate the intermediate reasoning processes during chain-of-thought (CoT) generation, leading to severe overthinking phenomena. In response, recent studies have designed reward functions to reinforce models' behaviors in producing shorter yet correct completions. Nevertheless, we observe that these length-penalty reward functions exacerbate RL training instability: as the completion length decreases, model accuracy abruptly collapses, often occurring early in training. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective solution GRPO-lambda, an efficient and stabilized variant of GRPO, which dynamically adjusts the reward strategy by monitoring the correctness ratio among completions within each query-sampled group. A low correctness ratio indicates the need to avoid length penalty that compromises CoT quality, triggering a switch to length-agnostic 0/1 rewards that prioritize reasoning capability. A high ratio maintains length penalties to boost efficiency. Experimental results show that our approach avoids training instability caused by length penalty while maintaining the optimal accuracy-efficiency trade-off. On the GSM8K, GPQA, MATH-500, AMC 2023, and AIME 2024 benchmarks, it improves average accuracy by 1.48% while reducing CoT sequence length by 47.3%.

  • 3 authors
·
May 23

AReaL: A Large-Scale Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning System for Language Reasoning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a trending paradigm for training large language models (LLMs), particularly for reasoning tasks. Effective RL for LLMs requires massive parallelization and poses an urgent need for efficient training systems. Most existing large-scale RL systems for LLMs are synchronous by alternating generation and training in a batch setting, where the rollouts in each training batch are generated by the same (or latest) model. This stabilizes RL training but suffers from severe system-level inefficiency. Generation must wait until the longest output in the batch is completed before model update, resulting in GPU underutilization. We present AReaL, a fully asynchronous RL system that completely decouples generation from training. Rollout workers in AReaL continuously generate new outputs without waiting, while training workers update the model whenever a batch of data is collected. AReaL also incorporates a collection of system-level optimizations, leading to substantially higher GPU utilization. To stabilize RL training, AReaL balances the workload of rollout and training workers to control data staleness, and adopts a staleness-enhanced PPO variant to better handle outdated training samples. Extensive experiments on math and code reasoning benchmarks show that AReaL achieves up to 2.57times training speedup compared to the best synchronous systems with the same number of GPUs and matched or even improved final performance. The code of AReaL is available at https://github.com/inclusionAI/AReaL/.

  • 13 authors
·
May 30 2

The Edge-of-Reach Problem in Offline Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

Offline reinforcement learning aims to train agents from pre-collected datasets. However, this comes with the added challenge of estimating the value of behaviors not covered in the dataset. Model-based methods offer a potential solution by training an approximate dynamics model, which then allows collection of additional synthetic data via rollouts in this model. The prevailing theory treats this approach as online RL in an approximate dynamics model, and any remaining performance gap is therefore understood as being due to dynamics model errors. In this paper, we analyze this assumption and investigate how popular algorithms perform as the learned dynamics model is improved. In contrast to both intuition and theory, if the learned dynamics model is replaced by the true error-free dynamics, existing model-based methods completely fail. This reveals a key oversight: The theoretical foundations assume sampling of full horizon rollouts in the learned dynamics model; however, in practice, the number of model-rollout steps is aggressively reduced to prevent accumulating errors. We show that this truncation of rollouts results in a set of edge-of-reach states at which we are effectively ``bootstrapping from the void.'' This triggers pathological value overestimation and complete performance collapse. We term this the edge-of-reach problem. Based on this new insight, we fill important gaps in existing theory, and reveal how prior model-based methods are primarily addressing the edge-of-reach problem, rather than model-inaccuracy as claimed. Finally, we propose Reach-Aware Value Learning (RAVL), a simple and robust method that directly addresses the edge-of-reach problem and hence - unlike existing methods - does not fail as the dynamics model is improved. Code open-sourced at: github.com/anyasims/edge-of-reach.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 19, 2024

XRPO: Pushing the limits of GRPO with Targeted Exploration and Exploitation

Reinforcement learning algorithms such as GRPO have driven recent advances in large language model (LLM) reasoning. While scaling the number of rollouts stabilizes training, existing approaches suffer from limited exploration on challenging prompts and leave informative feedback signals underexploited, due to context-independent rollout allocation across prompts (e.g., generating 16 rollouts per prompt) and relying heavily on sparse rewards. This paper presents XRPO(eXplore - eXploit GRPO), a unified framework that recasts policy optimization through the principled lens of rollout exploration-exploitation. To enhance exploration, XRPO introduces a mathematically grounded rollout allocator that adaptively prioritizes prompts with higher potential for uncertainty reduction. It further addresses stagnation on zero-reward prompts through an in-context seeding strategy that injects curated exemplars, steering the model into more difficult reasoning trajectories. To strengthen exploitation, XRPO develops a group-relative, novelty-aware advantage sharpening mechanism that leverages sequence likelihoods to amplify low-probability yet correct responses, thereby extending the policy's reach beyond sparse rewards. Experiments across diverse math and coding benchmarks on both reasoning and non-reasoning models demonstrate that XRPO outperforms existing advances (e.g., GRPO and GSPO) up to 4% pass@1 and 6% cons@32, while accelerating training convergence by up to 2.7X.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 8