Breaking Barriers: Do Reinforcement Post Training Gains Transfer To Unseen Domains?

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Hu, Chuxuan, Zhu, Yuxuan, Kellermann, Antony, Biddulph, Caleb, Waiwitlikhit, Suppakit, Benn, Jason, Kang, Daniel
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Hu, Chuxuan
Zhu, Yuxuan
Kellermann, Antony
Biddulph, Caleb
Waiwitlikhit, Suppakit
Benn, Jason
Kang, Daniel
author_facet Hu, Chuxuan
Zhu, Yuxuan
Kellermann, Antony
Biddulph, Caleb
Waiwitlikhit, Suppakit
Benn, Jason
Kang, Daniel
contents Reinforcement post training (RPT) has recently shown promise in improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, it remains unclear how well these improvements generalize to new domains, as prior work evaluates RPT models on data from the same domains used for post-training. To understand the generalizability of RPT, we conduct two studies with specific focus on Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). (1) Observational: we compare a wide range of open-weight RPT models against their corresponding base models across multiple domains, including both seen and unseen domains in their fine-tuning data. (2) Interventional: we fine-tune LLMs with RPT on single domains and evaluate their performance across multiple domains. Both studies converge on the same conclusion that, although RPT brings substantial gains on tasks similar to the fine-tuning data, the gains generalize inconsistently and can vanish on domains with different reasoning patterns.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_19733
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Breaking Barriers: Do Reinforcement Post Training Gains Transfer To Unseen Domains?
Hu, Chuxuan
Zhu, Yuxuan
Kellermann, Antony
Biddulph, Caleb
Waiwitlikhit, Suppakit
Benn, Jason
Kang, Daniel
Computation and Language
Reinforcement post training (RPT) has recently shown promise in improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, it remains unclear how well these improvements generalize to new domains, as prior work evaluates RPT models on data from the same domains used for post-training. To understand the generalizability of RPT, we conduct two studies with specific focus on Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). (1) Observational: we compare a wide range of open-weight RPT models against their corresponding base models across multiple domains, including both seen and unseen domains in their fine-tuning data. (2) Interventional: we fine-tune LLMs with RPT on single domains and evaluate their performance across multiple domains. Both studies converge on the same conclusion that, although RPT brings substantial gains on tasks similar to the fine-tuning data, the gains generalize inconsistently and can vanish on domains with different reasoning patterns.
title Breaking Barriers: Do Reinforcement Post Training Gains Transfer To Unseen Domains?
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19733