aiqbench analysis
Reasoning Arena addresses a critical bottleneck in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) by utilizing trace tournaments to extract gradient signals from previously discarded, non-diverse reward groups. By employing a dynamic anchor pool and Bradley-Terry modeling, the framework achieves scalable relative ranking without incurring quadratic pairwise comparison costs. This approach yields a 7.6% average performance boost on math and coding benchmarks while accelerating training by up to 41% and reducing generation compute by nearly half.
Reasoning Arena: Trace Tournaments When Verifiable Rewards Fall Short
arXiv:2606.09380v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a leading paradigm for improving the reasoning ability of large language models through outcome-based supervision. However, verifiable rewards frequently become uninformative at the group level: when all sampled traces of a given prompt receive identical rewards, group-relative advantage estimation provides no gradient signal, even though the traces may differ substantially in reasoning quality. We propose Reasoning Arena, an adaptive training framework that routes such non-diverse reward groups to a judge system instead of discarding them. Beyond examining the final answer, Reasoning Arena constructs trace tournaments, where reasoning traces are compared head-to-head to expose finer-grained preferences within the group, converting reasoning quality into rich relative reward signals. To make reward estimation efficient, rather than exhaustively comparing every pair, each new trace is evaluated against a small, dynamically updated pool of previously generated traces as anchors to efficiently establish a relative ranking. We then fit a Bradley-Terry model on the incomplete comparison graph, enabling scalable RL integration without quadratic pairwise comparisons. Empirical results demonstrate that Reasoning Arena consistently outperforms the RLVR baseline by 7.6% on average in competition mathematics and coding benchmarks. By converting otherwise wasted zero-advantage samples into useful gradient updates, our method accelerates training by 27% to 41%, saving nearly 50% of generation compute, and substantially improves overall reasoning performance.
Abstract:Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a leading paradigm for improving the reasoning ability of large language models through outcome-based supervision. However, verifiable rewards frequently become uninformative at the group level: when all sampled traces of a given prompt receive identical rewards, group-relative advantage estimation provides no gradient signal, even though the traces may differ substantially in reasoning quality. We propose Reasoning Arena, an adaptive training framework that routes such non-diverse reward groups to a judge system instead of discarding them. Beyond examining the final answer, Reasoning Arena constructs trace tournaments, where reasoning traces are compared head-to-head to expose finer-grained preferences within the group, converting reasoning quality into rich relative reward signals. To make reward estimation efficient, rather than exhaustively comparing every pair, each new trace is evaluated against a small, dynamically updated pool of previously generated traces as anchors to efficiently establish a relative ranking. We then fit a Bradley-Terry model on the incomplete comparison graph, enabling scalable RL integration without quadratic pairwise comparisons. Empirical results demonstrate that Reasoning Arena consistently outperforms the RLVR baseline by 7.6% on average in competition mathematics and coding benchmarks. By converting otherwise wasted zero-advantage samples into useful gradient updates, our method accelerates training by 27% to 41%, saving nearly 50% of generation compute, and substantially improves overall reasoning performance.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
arXiv:2606.09380 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2606.09380v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.09380 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 319 words
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