Learning Robust Reasoning through Guided Adversarial Self-Play

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Hauptverfasser: Li, Shuozhe, Tadiparthi, Vaishnav, Lee, Kwonjoon, Agarwal, Nakul, Mahjoub, Hossein Nourkhiz, Pari, Ehsan Moradi, Chen, Lizhang, Zhang, Amy, Leqi, Liu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Li, Shuozhe
Tadiparthi, Vaishnav
Lee, Kwonjoon
Agarwal, Nakul
Mahjoub, Hossein Nourkhiz
Pari, Ehsan Moradi
Chen, Lizhang
Zhang, Amy
Leqi, Liu
author_facet Li, Shuozhe
Tadiparthi, Vaishnav
Lee, Kwonjoon
Agarwal, Nakul
Mahjoub, Hossein Nourkhiz
Pari, Ehsan Moradi
Chen, Lizhang
Zhang, Amy
Leqi, Liu
contents Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) produces strong reasoning models, yet they can fail catastrophically when the conditioning context is fallible (e.g., corrupted chain-of-thought, misleading partial solutions, or mild input perturbations), since standard RLVR optimizes final-answer correctness only under clean conditioning. We introduce GASP (Guided Adversarial Self-Play), a robustification method that explicitly trains detect-and-repair capabilities using only outcome verification. Without human labels or external teachers, GASP forms an adversarial self-play game within a single model: a polluter learns to induce failure via locally coherent corruptions, while an agent learns to diagnose and recover under the same corrupted conditioning. To address the scarcity of successful recoveries early in training, we propose in-distribution repair guidance, an imitation term on self-generated repairs that increases recovery probability while preserving previously acquired capabilities. Across four open-weight models (1.5B--8B), GASP transforms strong-but-brittle reasoners into robust ones that withstand misleading and perturbed context while often improving clean accuracy. Further analysis shows that adversarial corruptions induce an effective curriculum, and in-distribution guidance enables rapid recovery learning with minimal representational drift.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_00173
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Robust Reasoning through Guided Adversarial Self-Play
Li, Shuozhe
Tadiparthi, Vaishnav
Lee, Kwonjoon
Agarwal, Nakul
Mahjoub, Hossein Nourkhiz
Pari, Ehsan Moradi
Chen, Lizhang
Zhang, Amy
Leqi, Liu
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) produces strong reasoning models, yet they can fail catastrophically when the conditioning context is fallible (e.g., corrupted chain-of-thought, misleading partial solutions, or mild input perturbations), since standard RLVR optimizes final-answer correctness only under clean conditioning. We introduce GASP (Guided Adversarial Self-Play), a robustification method that explicitly trains detect-and-repair capabilities using only outcome verification. Without human labels or external teachers, GASP forms an adversarial self-play game within a single model: a polluter learns to induce failure via locally coherent corruptions, while an agent learns to diagnose and recover under the same corrupted conditioning. To address the scarcity of successful recoveries early in training, we propose in-distribution repair guidance, an imitation term on self-generated repairs that increases recovery probability while preserving previously acquired capabilities. Across four open-weight models (1.5B--8B), GASP transforms strong-but-brittle reasoners into robust ones that withstand misleading and perturbed context while often improving clean accuracy. Further analysis shows that adversarial corruptions induce an effective curriculum, and in-distribution guidance enables rapid recovery learning with minimal representational drift.
title Learning Robust Reasoning through Guided Adversarial Self-Play
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00173