Implicit Actor Critic Coupling via a Supervised Learning Framework for RLVR

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Li, Jiaming, Chen, Longze, Gong, Ze, Chen, Yukun, Wang, Lu, He, Wanwei, Luo, Run, Yang, Min
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Li, Jiaming
Chen, Longze
Gong, Ze
Chen, Yukun
Wang, Lu
He, Wanwei
Luo, Run
Yang, Min
author_facet Li, Jiaming
Chen, Longze
Gong, Ze
Chen, Yukun
Wang, Lu
He, Wanwei
Luo, Run
Yang, Min
contents Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have empowered large language models (LLMs) to tackle challenging reasoning tasks such as mathematics and programming. Despite its promise, the RLVR paradigm poses significant challenges, as existing methods often suffer from sparse reward signals and unstable policy gradient updates, inherent to RL-based approaches. To address the challenges, we propose $\textbf{PACS}$, a novel RLVR framework that achieves im$\textbf{P}$licit $\textbf{A}$ctor $\textbf{C}$ritic coupling via a $\textbf{S}$upervised learning framework. By treating the outcome reward as a predictable label, we reformulate the RLVR problem into a supervised learning task over a score function parameterized by the policy model and optimized using cross-entropy loss. A detailed gradient analysis shows that this supervised formulation inherently recovers the classical policy gradient update while providing more stable and efficient training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PACS significantly outperforms strong open-source models and RLVR baselines, yielding substantial average gains of $\textbf{+8.26\%}$ (4B) and $\textbf{+9.57\%}$ (8B) over base models offering a promising avenue for LLMs post-training with verifiable rewards. Our code and data are available as open source at https://github.com/ritzz-ai/PACS.
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Implicit Actor Critic Coupling via a Supervised Learning Framework for RLVR
Li, Jiaming
Chen, Longze
Gong, Ze
Chen, Yukun
Wang, Lu
He, Wanwei
Luo, Run
Yang, Min
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have empowered large language models (LLMs) to tackle challenging reasoning tasks such as mathematics and programming. Despite its promise, the RLVR paradigm poses significant challenges, as existing methods often suffer from sparse reward signals and unstable policy gradient updates, inherent to RL-based approaches. To address the challenges, we propose $\textbf{PACS}$, a novel RLVR framework that achieves im$\textbf{P}$licit $\textbf{A}$ctor $\textbf{C}$ritic coupling via a $\textbf{S}$upervised learning framework. By treating the outcome reward as a predictable label, we reformulate the RLVR problem into a supervised learning task over a score function parameterized by the policy model and optimized using cross-entropy loss. A detailed gradient analysis shows that this supervised formulation inherently recovers the classical policy gradient update while providing more stable and efficient training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PACS significantly outperforms strong open-source models and RLVR baselines, yielding substantial average gains of $\textbf{+8.26\%}$ (4B) and $\textbf{+9.57\%}$ (8B) over base models offering a promising avenue for LLMs post-training with verifiable rewards. Our code and data are available as open source at https://github.com/ritzz-ai/PACS.
title Implicit Actor Critic Coupling via a Supervised Learning Framework for RLVR
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02522