aiqbench analysis
RARO introduces a novel inverse reinforcement learning framework that enables LLMs to master reasoning tasks using only expert demonstrations, effectively bypassing the need for task-specific verifiers. By training a policy and critic in an adversarial game, the method achieves significant accuracy gains on math and logic benchmarks while maintaining robust scaling properties comparable to traditional RL approaches. This advancement is particularly relevant for real-world applications where ground truth verifiers are unavailable but abundant high-quality examples exist.
Escaping the Verifier: Learning to Reason via Demonstrations
arXiv:2511.21667v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Training Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason often relies on Reinforcement Learning (RL) with task-specific verifiers. However, many real-world reasoning-intensive tasks lack verifiers, despite offering abundant expert demonstrations that remain under-utilized for reasoning-focused training. We introduce RARO (Relativistic Adversarial Reasoning Optimization), which learns strong reasoning capabilities from expert demonstrations alone via Inverse Reinforcement Learning. RARO sets up an adversarial game between a policy and a relativistic critic: the policy learns to mimic expert answers, while the critic aims to identify the experts among expert-policy answer pairs. Both the policy and the critic are trained jointly and continuously via RL, and we identify the key stabilization techniques required for robust learning. Empirically, RARO significantly outperforms strong verifier-free baselines across all evaluation tasks: +13.7% accuracy on Countdown (1.5B), +8.2% accuracy on DeepMath (7B), and +19.1% win-rate on Poetry Writing (7B) against expert poems. RARO also exhibits similar robust scaling trends as RL with verifiers. These results demonstrate that RARO effectively elicits strong reasoning performance from expert demonstrations alone, enabling robust reasoning learning even when task-specific verifiers are unavailable.
Abstract:Training Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason often relies on Reinforcement Learning (RL) with task-specific verifiers. However, many real-world reasoning-intensive tasks lack verifiers, despite offering abundant expert demonstrations that remain under-utilized for reasoning-focused training. We introduce RARO (Relativistic Adversarial Reasoning Optimization), which learns strong reasoning capabilities from expert demonstrations alone via Inverse Reinforcement Learning. RARO sets up an adversarial game between a policy and a relativistic critic: the policy learns to mimic expert answers, while the critic aims to identify the experts among expert-policy answer pairs. Both the policy and the critic are trained jointly and continuously via RL, and we identify the key stabilization techniques required for robust learning. Empirically, RARO significantly outperforms strong verifier-free baselines across all evaluation tasks: +13.7% accuracy on Countdown (1.5B), +8.2% accuracy on DeepMath (7B), and +19.1% win-rate on Poetry Writing (7B) against expert poems. RARO also exhibits similar robust scaling trends as RL with verifiers. These results demonstrate that RARO effectively elicits strong reasoning performance from expert demonstrations alone, enabling robust reasoning learning even when task-specific verifiers are unavailable.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2511.21667 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2511.21667v4 [cs.LG] for this version)
Full text under the publisher's open licence · 190 words
Related coverage
Lattice-Based Cryptography Explained
Quantum Zeitgeist · Aug 15, 2026
Frontier AI Risk Report (February–March 2026)
METR · May 19, 2026
Informe de riesgos de la IA de frontera (febrero–marzo de 2026)
METR · May 19, 2026
Frontier Risk Report (February to March 2026)
METR · May 19, 2026