ReMA: Learning to Meta-think for LLMs with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wan, Ziyu, Li, Yunxiang, Wen, Xiaoyu, Song, Yan, Wang, Hanjing, Yang, Linyi, Schmidt, Mark, Wang, Jun, Zhang, Weinan, Hu, Shuyue, Wen, Ying
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912395806375936
author Wan, Ziyu
Li, Yunxiang
Wen, Xiaoyu
Song, Yan
Wang, Hanjing
Yang, Linyi
Schmidt, Mark
Wang, Jun
Zhang, Weinan
Hu, Shuyue
Wen, Ying
author_facet Wan, Ziyu
Li, Yunxiang
Wen, Xiaoyu
Song, Yan
Wang, Hanjing
Yang, Linyi
Schmidt, Mark
Wang, Jun
Zhang, Weinan
Hu, Shuyue
Wen, Ying
contents Recent research on Reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sought to further enhance their performance by integrating meta-thinking -- enabling models to monitor, evaluate, and control their reasoning processes for more adaptive and effective problem-solving. However, current single-agent work lacks a specialized design for acquiring meta-thinking, resulting in low efficacy. To address this challenge, we introduce Reinforced Meta-thinking Agents (ReMA), a novel framework that leverages Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) to elicit meta-thinking behaviors, encouraging LLMs to think about thinking. ReMA decouples the reasoning process into two hierarchical agents: a high-level meta-thinking agent responsible for generating strategic oversight and plans, and a low-level reasoning agent for detailed executions. Through iterative reinforcement learning with aligned objectives, these agents explore and learn collaboration, leading to improved generalization and robustness. Empirical results from single-turn experiments demonstrate that ReMA outperforms single-agent RL baselines on complex reasoning tasks, including competitive-level mathematical benchmarks and LLM-as-a-Judge benchmarks. Additionally, we further extend ReMA to multi-turn interaction settings, leveraging turn-level ratio and parameter sharing to improve efficiency. Comprehensive ablation studies further illustrate the evolving dynamics of each distinct agent, providing valuable insights into how the meta-thinking reasoning process enhances the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Our code can be found in https://github.com/ziyuwan/ReMA-public
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_09501
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ReMA: Learning to Meta-think for LLMs with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Wan, Ziyu
Li, Yunxiang
Wen, Xiaoyu
Song, Yan
Wang, Hanjing
Yang, Linyi
Schmidt, Mark
Wang, Jun
Zhang, Weinan
Hu, Shuyue
Wen, Ying
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
Recent research on Reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sought to further enhance their performance by integrating meta-thinking -- enabling models to monitor, evaluate, and control their reasoning processes for more adaptive and effective problem-solving. However, current single-agent work lacks a specialized design for acquiring meta-thinking, resulting in low efficacy. To address this challenge, we introduce Reinforced Meta-thinking Agents (ReMA), a novel framework that leverages Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) to elicit meta-thinking behaviors, encouraging LLMs to think about thinking. ReMA decouples the reasoning process into two hierarchical agents: a high-level meta-thinking agent responsible for generating strategic oversight and plans, and a low-level reasoning agent for detailed executions. Through iterative reinforcement learning with aligned objectives, these agents explore and learn collaboration, leading to improved generalization and robustness. Empirical results from single-turn experiments demonstrate that ReMA outperforms single-agent RL baselines on complex reasoning tasks, including competitive-level mathematical benchmarks and LLM-as-a-Judge benchmarks. Additionally, we further extend ReMA to multi-turn interaction settings, leveraging turn-level ratio and parameter sharing to improve efficiency. Comprehensive ablation studies further illustrate the evolving dynamics of each distinct agent, providing valuable insights into how the meta-thinking reasoning process enhances the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Our code can be found in https://github.com/ziyuwan/ReMA-public
title ReMA: Learning to Meta-think for LLMs with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09501