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Autori principali: Tao, Leitian, Kulikov, Ilia, Saha, Swarnadeep, Wang, Tianlu, Xu, Jing, Li, Sharon, Weston, Jason E, Yu, Ping
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07242
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author Tao, Leitian
Kulikov, Ilia
Saha, Swarnadeep
Wang, Tianlu
Xu, Jing
Li, Sharon
Weston, Jason E
Yu, Ping
author_facet Tao, Leitian
Kulikov, Ilia
Saha, Swarnadeep
Wang, Tianlu
Xu, Jing
Li, Sharon
Weston, Jason E
Yu, Ping
contents Post-training for reasoning of large language models (LLMs) increasingly relies on verifiable rewards: deterministic checkers that provide 0-1 correctness signals. While reliable, such binary feedback is brittle--many tasks admit partially correct or alternative answers that verifiers under-credit, and the resulting all-or-nothing supervision limits learning. Reward models offer richer, continuous feedback, which can serve as a complementary supervisory signal to verifiers. We introduce HERO (Hybrid Ensemble Reward Optimization), a reinforcement learning framework that integrates verifier signals with reward-model scores in a structured way. HERO employs stratified normalization to bound reward-model scores within verifier-defined groups, preserving correctness while refining quality distinctions, and variance-aware weighting to emphasize challenging prompts where dense signals matter most. Across diverse mathematical reasoning benchmarks, HERO consistently outperforms RM-only and verifier-only baselines, with strong gains on both verifiable and hard-to-verify tasks. Our results show that hybrid reward design retains the stability of verifiers while leveraging the nuance of reward models to advance reasoning.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_07242
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hybrid Reinforcement: When Reward Is Sparse, It's Better to Be Dense
Tao, Leitian
Kulikov, Ilia
Saha, Swarnadeep
Wang, Tianlu
Xu, Jing
Li, Sharon
Weston, Jason E
Yu, Ping
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Post-training for reasoning of large language models (LLMs) increasingly relies on verifiable rewards: deterministic checkers that provide 0-1 correctness signals. While reliable, such binary feedback is brittle--many tasks admit partially correct or alternative answers that verifiers under-credit, and the resulting all-or-nothing supervision limits learning. Reward models offer richer, continuous feedback, which can serve as a complementary supervisory signal to verifiers. We introduce HERO (Hybrid Ensemble Reward Optimization), a reinforcement learning framework that integrates verifier signals with reward-model scores in a structured way. HERO employs stratified normalization to bound reward-model scores within verifier-defined groups, preserving correctness while refining quality distinctions, and variance-aware weighting to emphasize challenging prompts where dense signals matter most. Across diverse mathematical reasoning benchmarks, HERO consistently outperforms RM-only and verifier-only baselines, with strong gains on both verifiable and hard-to-verify tasks. Our results show that hybrid reward design retains the stability of verifiers while leveraging the nuance of reward models to advance reasoning.
title Hybrid Reinforcement: When Reward Is Sparse, It's Better to Be Dense
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07242