中文

无监督强化学习在数学推理中的成功时与否:流形包围视角

机器学习 2026-03-18 v1 计算与语言

摘要

Although outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) significantly advances the mathematical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), its reliance on computationally expensive ground-truth annotations imposes a severe scalability bottleneck. Unsupervised RL guided by intrinsic rewards offers a scalable alternative, yet it suffers from opaque training dynamics and catastrophic instability, such as policy collapse and reward hacking. In this paper, we first design and evaluate a suite of intrinsic rewards that explicitly enforce concise and certain generation. Second, to discover the boundaries of this approach, we test base models across a spectrum of intrinsic reasoning capabilities, revealing how a model's foundational logical prior dictates its success or failure. Finally, to demystify why certain configurations stabilize while others collapse, we introduce a novel geometric diagnostic lens, showing that successful cases are enveloped by manifolds. Ultimately, our work goes beyond merely demonstrating that enforcing concise and certain responses successfully boosts mathematical reasoning; we reveal when this unsupervised approach breaks down and geometrically diagnose why.

关键词

引用

@article{arxiv.2603.16578,
  title  = {When and Why Does Unsupervised RL Succeed in Mathematical Reasoning? A Manifold Envelopment Perspective},
  author = {Zelin Zhang and Fei Cheng and Chenhui Chu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.16578},
  year   = {2026}
}

备注

work in progress