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Main Authors: Kumar, Medha, Xu, Zifei, Wang, Xin, Webb, Tristan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15694
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author Kumar, Medha
Xu, Zifei
Wang, Xin
Webb, Tristan
author_facet Kumar, Medha
Xu, Zifei
Wang, Xin
Webb, Tristan
contents Strong reasoning capabilities can now be achieved by large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) without any supervised fine-tuning. Although post-training quantization (PTQ) and quantization-aware training (QAT) are well studied in the context of fine-tuning, how quantization impacts RL in large reasoning models (LRMs) remains an open question. To answer this question, we conducted systematic experiments and discovered a significant gap in reasoning performance on mathematical benchmarks between post-RL quantized models and their quantization-aware RL optimized counterparts. Our findings suggest that quantization-aware RL training negatively impacted the learning process, whereas PTQ and QLoRA led to greater performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_15694
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Impact of Quantization on Large Reasoning Model Reinforcement Learning
Kumar, Medha
Xu, Zifei
Wang, Xin
Webb, Tristan
Machine Learning
Strong reasoning capabilities can now be achieved by large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) without any supervised fine-tuning. Although post-training quantization (PTQ) and quantization-aware training (QAT) are well studied in the context of fine-tuning, how quantization impacts RL in large reasoning models (LRMs) remains an open question. To answer this question, we conducted systematic experiments and discovered a significant gap in reasoning performance on mathematical benchmarks between post-RL quantized models and their quantization-aware RL optimized counterparts. Our findings suggest that quantization-aware RL training negatively impacted the learning process, whereas PTQ and QLoRA led to greater performance.
title The Impact of Quantization on Large Reasoning Model Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15694