ResRL: Boosting LLM Reasoning via Negative Sample Projection Residual Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lin, Zihan, Wang, Xiaohan, Cao, Jie, Chai, Jiajun, Wang, Li, Lu, Xiaodong, Lin, Wei, He, Ran, Yin, Guojun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Lin, Zihan
Wang, Xiaohan
Cao, Jie
Chai, Jiajun
Wang, Li
Lu, Xiaodong
Lin, Wei
He, Ran
Yin, Guojun
author_facet Lin, Zihan
Wang, Xiaohan
Cao, Jie
Chai, Jiajun
Wang, Li
Lu, Xiaodong
Lin, Wei
He, Ran
Yin, Guojun
contents Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) enhances reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) but usually exhibits limited generation diversity due to the over-incentivization of positive rewards. Although methods like Negative Sample Reinforcement (NSR) mitigate this issue by upweighting penalty from negative samples, they may suppress the semantic distributions shared between positive and negative responses. To boost reasoning ability without losing diversity, this paper proposes negative sample projection Residual Reinforcement Learning (ResRL) that decouples similar semantic distributions among positive and negative responses. We theoretically link Lazy Likelihood Displacement (LLD) to negative-positive head-gradient interference and derive a single-forward proxy that upper-bounds representation alignment to guide conservative advantage reweighting. ResRL then projects negative-token hidden representations onto an SVD-based low-rank positive subspace and uses projection residuals to modulate negative gradients, improving reasoning while preserving diversity and outperforming strong baselines on average across twelve benchmarks spanning Mathematics, Code, Agent Tasks, and Function Calling. Notably, ResRL surpasses NSR on mathematical reasoning by 9.4\% in Avg@16 and 7.0\% in Pass@128. Code is available at https://github.com/1229095296/ResRL.git.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_00380
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ResRL: Boosting LLM Reasoning via Negative Sample Projection Residual Reinforcement Learning
Lin, Zihan
Wang, Xiaohan
Cao, Jie
Chai, Jiajun
Wang, Li
Lu, Xiaodong
Lin, Wei
He, Ran
Yin, Guojun
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) enhances reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) but usually exhibits limited generation diversity due to the over-incentivization of positive rewards. Although methods like Negative Sample Reinforcement (NSR) mitigate this issue by upweighting penalty from negative samples, they may suppress the semantic distributions shared between positive and negative responses. To boost reasoning ability without losing diversity, this paper proposes negative sample projection Residual Reinforcement Learning (ResRL) that decouples similar semantic distributions among positive and negative responses. We theoretically link Lazy Likelihood Displacement (LLD) to negative-positive head-gradient interference and derive a single-forward proxy that upper-bounds representation alignment to guide conservative advantage reweighting. ResRL then projects negative-token hidden representations onto an SVD-based low-rank positive subspace and uses projection residuals to modulate negative gradients, improving reasoning while preserving diversity and outperforming strong baselines on average across twelve benchmarks spanning Mathematics, Code, Agent Tasks, and Function Calling. Notably, ResRL surpasses NSR on mathematical reasoning by 9.4\% in Avg@16 and 7.0\% in Pass@128. Code is available at https://github.com/1229095296/ResRL.git.
title ResRL: Boosting LLM Reasoning via Negative Sample Projection Residual Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00380