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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06024 |
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| _version_ | 1866914027069767680 |
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| author | He, Haoyang Rong, Zihua Ji, Kun Li, Chenyang Huang, Qing Xia, Chong Yang, Lan Zhang, Honggang |
| author_facet | He, Haoyang Rong, Zihua Ji, Kun Li, Chenyang Huang, Qing Xia, Chong Yang, Lan Zhang, Honggang |
| contents | Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become the dominant paradigm for strengthening the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Yet the rule-based reward functions commonly used on mathematical or programming benchmarks assess only answer format and correctness, providing no signal as to whether the induced Chain-of-Thought (CoT) actually improves the answer. Furthermore, such task-specific training offers limited control over logical depth and therefore may fail to reveal a model's genuine reasoning capacity. We propose Dynamic Reasoning Efficiency Reward (DRER) -- a plug-and-play RL reward framework that reshapes both reward and advantage signals. (i) A Reasoning Quality Reward assigns fine-grained credit to those reasoning chains that demonstrably raise the likelihood of the correct answer, directly incentivising the trajectories with beneficial CoT tokens. (ii) A Dynamic Length Advantage decays the advantage of responses whose length deviates from a validation-derived threshold, stabilising training. To facilitate rigorous assessment, we also release Logictree, a dynamically constructed deductive reasoning dataset that functions both as RL training data and as a comprehensive benchmark. Experiments confirm the effectiveness of DRER: our 7B model attains GPT-o3-mini level performance on Logictree with 400 trianing steps, while the average confidence of CoT-augmented answers rises by 30%. The model further exhibits generalisation across diverse logical-reasoning datasets, and the mathematical benchmark AIME24. These results illuminate how RL shapes CoT behaviour and chart a practical path toward enhancing formal-reasoning skills in large language models. All code and data are available in repository https://github.com/Henryhe09/DRER. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_06024 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Rethinking Reasoning Quality in Large Language Models through Enhanced Chain-of-Thought via RL He, Haoyang Rong, Zihua Ji, Kun Li, Chenyang Huang, Qing Xia, Chong Yang, Lan Zhang, Honggang Artificial Intelligence Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become the dominant paradigm for strengthening the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Yet the rule-based reward functions commonly used on mathematical or programming benchmarks assess only answer format and correctness, providing no signal as to whether the induced Chain-of-Thought (CoT) actually improves the answer. Furthermore, such task-specific training offers limited control over logical depth and therefore may fail to reveal a model's genuine reasoning capacity. We propose Dynamic Reasoning Efficiency Reward (DRER) -- a plug-and-play RL reward framework that reshapes both reward and advantage signals. (i) A Reasoning Quality Reward assigns fine-grained credit to those reasoning chains that demonstrably raise the likelihood of the correct answer, directly incentivising the trajectories with beneficial CoT tokens. (ii) A Dynamic Length Advantage decays the advantage of responses whose length deviates from a validation-derived threshold, stabilising training. To facilitate rigorous assessment, we also release Logictree, a dynamically constructed deductive reasoning dataset that functions both as RL training data and as a comprehensive benchmark. Experiments confirm the effectiveness of DRER: our 7B model attains GPT-o3-mini level performance on Logictree with 400 trianing steps, while the average confidence of CoT-augmented answers rises by 30%. The model further exhibits generalisation across diverse logical-reasoning datasets, and the mathematical benchmark AIME24. These results illuminate how RL shapes CoT behaviour and chart a practical path toward enhancing formal-reasoning skills in large language models. All code and data are available in repository https://github.com/Henryhe09/DRER. |
| title | Rethinking Reasoning Quality in Large Language Models through Enhanced Chain-of-Thought via RL |
| topic | Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06024 |