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Main Authors: Zhang, Rui, Wu, Xinle, Lu, Yao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00609
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author Zhang, Rui
Wu, Xinle
Lu, Yao
author_facet Zhang, Rui
Wu, Xinle
Lu, Yao
contents Reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards has achieved strong progress in reasoning-oriented LLMs, but extending it to multi-domain RL remains challenging due to reward unreliability in non-verifiable tasks and capability interference across domains. We propose CARE-RL to combine protocol-aware reward generation with capability-aware optimization for mitigating cross-domain conflicts. For non-verifiable tasks, the Protocol-Aware Generative Reward Model (PA-GRM) constructs prompt-level evaluation protocols and schemas before producing trace-conditioned rewards, enabling task-adaptive yet comparable evaluation of open-ended responses. For multi-domain optimization, Direction-Aware Capability Subspace Projection (DACSP) extracts historical capability directions from previous RL stages and modulates later updates by amplifying aligned components, suppressing conflicting components, and preserving orthogonal updates. Experiments across math, chat, and instruction-following benchmarks show that CARE-RL consistently outperforms standard multi-domain RL baselines, achieving Total Avg scores of 47.9 and 50.7 on Qwen2.5-7B and Qwen3-4B, respectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_00609
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CARE-RL: Capability-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Mitigating Cross-Domain Conflicts
Zhang, Rui
Wu, Xinle
Lu, Yao
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards has achieved strong progress in reasoning-oriented LLMs, but extending it to multi-domain RL remains challenging due to reward unreliability in non-verifiable tasks and capability interference across domains. We propose CARE-RL to combine protocol-aware reward generation with capability-aware optimization for mitigating cross-domain conflicts. For non-verifiable tasks, the Protocol-Aware Generative Reward Model (PA-GRM) constructs prompt-level evaluation protocols and schemas before producing trace-conditioned rewards, enabling task-adaptive yet comparable evaluation of open-ended responses. For multi-domain optimization, Direction-Aware Capability Subspace Projection (DACSP) extracts historical capability directions from previous RL stages and modulates later updates by amplifying aligned components, suppressing conflicting components, and preserving orthogonal updates. Experiments across math, chat, and instruction-following benchmarks show that CARE-RL consistently outperforms standard multi-domain RL baselines, achieving Total Avg scores of 47.9 and 50.7 on Qwen2.5-7B and Qwen3-4B, respectively.
title CARE-RL: Capability-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Mitigating Cross-Domain Conflicts
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00609