Difficulty-Adaptive Tree-Structured Policy Optimization for Expanding Reasoning Coverage in RLVR

Abstract:Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has been central to the recent success of Large Reasoning Models. However, while RLVR significantly improves single-sample accuracy, it often fails to expand the model's intrinsic reasoning coverage (pass@k) due to limited exploration during training. To address this, we optimize the structural design of train-time rollouts to enhance pass@k. Our analysis identifies three key design principles: (1) difficulty-adaptive rollout can play an important role in expanding pass@k, beyond serving as an efficiency heuristic; (2) tree-based rollout outperforms parallel sampling in discovering correct answers; and (3) sentence-entropy-guided forking overcomes the localization phenomenon of token-level branching to maximize semantic diversity. Building on these insights, we propose DATPO (Difficulty-Adaptive Sentence-entropy-guided Tree-structured Policy Optimization). DATPO integrates difficulty-adaptive tree search with a sibling-diversity advantage term, explicitly promoting semantic diversity to expand reasoning coverage during training. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DATPO outperforms baselines especially in pass@k, which directly translates to superior test-time scaling performance.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.08650 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2609.08650v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.08650 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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