BroRL: Scaling Reinforcement Learning via Broadened Exploration

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Hu, Jian, Liu, Mingjie, Lu, Ximing, Wu, Fang, Harchaoui, Zaid, Diao, Shizhe, Choi, Yejin, Molchanov, Pavlo, Yang, Jun, Kautz, Jan, Dong, Yi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Hu, Jian
Liu, Mingjie
Lu, Ximing
Wu, Fang
Harchaoui, Zaid
Diao, Shizhe
Choi, Yejin
Molchanov, Pavlo
Yang, Jun
Kautz, Jan
Dong, Yi
author_facet Hu, Jian
Liu, Mingjie
Lu, Ximing
Wu, Fang
Harchaoui, Zaid
Diao, Shizhe
Choi, Yejin
Molchanov, Pavlo
Yang, Jun
Kautz, Jan
Dong, Yi
contents Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a key ingredient for unlocking complex reasoning capabilities in large language models. Recent work ProRL has shown promise in scaling RL by increasing the number of training steps. However, performance plateaus after thousands of steps, with clear diminishing returns from allocating more computation to additional training. In this work, we investigate a complementary paradigm for scaling RL, BroR-Lincreasing the number of rollouts per example to hundreds to exhaustively Broaden exploration, which yields continuous performance gains beyond the saturation point observed in ProRL when scaling the number of training steps. Our approach is motivated by a mass balance equation analysis allowing us to characterize the rate of change in probability mass for correct and incorrect tokens during the reinforcement process. We show that under a one-step RL assumption, sampled rollout tokens always contribute to correct-mass expansion, while unsampled tokens outside rollouts may lead to gains or losses depending on their distribution and the net reward balance. Importantly, as the number of rollouts per example N increases, the effect of unsampled terms diminishes, ensuring overall correct-mass expansion. To validate our theoretical analysis, we conduct simulations under more relaxed conditions and find that a sufficiently large rollout size N-corresponding to ample exploration-guarantees an increase in the probability mass of all correct tokens. Empirically, BroRL revives models saturated after 3K ProRL training steps and demonstrates robust, continuous improvement, achieving state-of-the-art results for the 1.5B model across diverse benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_01180
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BroRL: Scaling Reinforcement Learning via Broadened Exploration
Hu, Jian
Liu, Mingjie
Lu, Ximing
Wu, Fang
Harchaoui, Zaid
Diao, Shizhe
Choi, Yejin
Molchanov, Pavlo
Yang, Jun
Kautz, Jan
Dong, Yi
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a key ingredient for unlocking complex reasoning capabilities in large language models. Recent work ProRL has shown promise in scaling RL by increasing the number of training steps. However, performance plateaus after thousands of steps, with clear diminishing returns from allocating more computation to additional training. In this work, we investigate a complementary paradigm for scaling RL, BroR-Lincreasing the number of rollouts per example to hundreds to exhaustively Broaden exploration, which yields continuous performance gains beyond the saturation point observed in ProRL when scaling the number of training steps. Our approach is motivated by a mass balance equation analysis allowing us to characterize the rate of change in probability mass for correct and incorrect tokens during the reinforcement process. We show that under a one-step RL assumption, sampled rollout tokens always contribute to correct-mass expansion, while unsampled tokens outside rollouts may lead to gains or losses depending on their distribution and the net reward balance. Importantly, as the number of rollouts per example N increases, the effect of unsampled terms diminishes, ensuring overall correct-mass expansion. To validate our theoretical analysis, we conduct simulations under more relaxed conditions and find that a sufficiently large rollout size N-corresponding to ample exploration-guarantees an increase in the probability mass of all correct tokens. Empirically, BroRL revives models saturated after 3K ProRL training steps and demonstrates robust, continuous improvement, achieving state-of-the-art results for the 1.5B model across diverse benchmarks.
title BroRL: Scaling Reinforcement Learning via Broadened Exploration
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01180