English

Buffer Matters: Unleashing the Power of Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning in Large Language Model Reasoning

Artificial Intelligence 2026-03-17 v2

Abstract

Traditional on-policy Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) frameworks suffer from experience waste and reward homogeneity, which directly hinders learning efficiency on difficult samples during large language models post-training. In this paper, we introduce Batch Adaptation Policy Optimization (BAPO), an off-policy RLVR framework to improve the data efficiency in large language models post-training. It dynamically selects training batches by re-evaluating historically difficult samples and reusing high-quality ones, while holding a lower bound guarantee for policy improvement. Extensive experiments further demonstrate that BAPO achieves an average 12.5% improvement over GRPO across mathematics, planning, and visual reasoning tasks. Crucially, BAPO successfully resolves 40.7% of problems that base models consistently fail to solve.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.20722,
  title  = {Buffer Matters: Unleashing the Power of Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning in Large Language Model Reasoning},
  author = {Xu Wan and Yansheng Wang and Wenqi Huang and Mingyang Sun},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.20722},
  year   = {2026}
}