Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves large language model reasoning, but its practical scaling is constrained by expensive on-policy rollouts and the cost of obtaining reliable targets at scale. Existing methods address sample selection, incomplete supervision, or noisy labels separately, often entangling supervision logic with distributed training and hindering controlled comparison and reuse. We present DE-Venus, a unified framework for data-efficient RLVR that treats supervision as evolving state across data preparation and policy optimization. It organizes this lifecycle into three modules: Active Data Selection allocates training and annotation budgets; Weak Supervision Construction derives learning signals from unlabeled examples; and Training-Time Supervision Refinement filters or corrects unreliable supervision. DE-Venus supports seven representative methods and a data-selection pipeline by expressing method-specific decisions as offline dataset transitions or online transformations of targets, rewards, batches, and advantages while preserving verl's distributed execution contracts. Across public benchmarks and three business scenarios, separate configurations preserve or improve model quality with only 10% of labels or as little as 13% of relevant data; selected business configurations also reduce observed convergence steps by 63%--75%. DE-Venus thus reduces annotation and training costs without sacrificing scalable RL execution.
Self-reflection is a powerful mechanism for credit assignment in human learning, converting sparse outcome feedback into actionable guidance. However, its potential for post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) remains underexplored. We propose Self-Reflective Policy Optimization (SRPO), a framework that internalizes this capability. SRPO enables LLMs to analyze their own completed trajectories, synthesize errors into concise "reflection patches," and use reflection-conditioned teacher scores on student on-policy rollouts as dense token-level training signals. This process effectively transforms sparse terminal supervision into dense, token-level learning signals without requiring external critics, separate reward models, or larger teacher models. We demonstrate that SRPO achieves state-of-the-art performance across mathematical reasoning and long-horizon agentic benchmarks with exceptional data efficiency. Using a Qwen3-8B base model, SRPO attains 73.3% on AIME'24 using only 8% (0.08x) of the training FLOPs required by scaled supervised fine-tuning, while significantly improving success rates on WebShop (64.7%), ALFWorld (76.8%), and SWE-Bench-Lite (31.2%). Code is available at https://github.com/Galleons2029/SRPO
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training paradigm for eliciting reasoning capabilities in large language models, yet uniform task sampling allocates compute without regard to differences in how tasks respond to optimization. Existing task-valuation methods mostly rely on snapshot-based signals such as current pass rate or reward, which estimate how solvable a task is under the current policy. However, tasks with similar current solvability can still differ substantially in how positively they respond to further training. We study this residual axis as task learnability: a regime-conditional measure of expected positive response to continued training under a fixed RL post-training regime. By analyzing per-task reward trajectories, we find that learnability is reproducible across independently sampled training contexts and predictive of downstream utility. To make this signal practical before training begins, we propose TrajVal, a lightweight probe-based estimator that approximates per-task learnability from a short probe run and two endpoint evaluations. TrajVal can be used either as a standalone static prior for task sampling or as a multiplicative prior for existing online schedulers. Experiments on mathematical and logical reasoning benchmarks across multiple model scales show that TrajVal improves data efficiency over uniform sampling and provides complementary gains when combined with online scheduling methods.
Jongchan Park, Seungjun Oh, Seungho Baek +1cs.LG cs.AI
Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning (URL) aims to pre-train scalable, skill-conditioned policies without extrinsic rewards, serving as a foundation for downstream control tasks. Despite recent progress, we argue that current off-policy URL methods are limited by two critical, overlooked bottlenecks: (1) non-stationary skill semantics and (2) brittle generalization. To address these challenges, we propose GenDa (Generalizable Data-efficient Agent), a unified framework for robust unsupervised reinforcement learning. First, we introduce a skill relabeling mechanism to mitigate non-stationarity and significantly improve data efficiency for pre-training. Second, we propose a Complementary Information Bottleneck (CIB), encouraging the learned skill policy to focus on ego-centric features and become robust to distribution shifts for downstream tasks. Through various experiments, we demonstrate that GenDa significantly enhances the scalability of URL with superior generalizability and data efficiency. Our code and videos are available at https://ihatebroccoli.github.io/official-GenDa.
Guangcheng Zhu, Shenzhi Yang, Haobo Wang +9cs.LG cs.AI
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) significantly advances LLM reasoning, yet it faces a dilemma: standard supervised scaling is throttled by high annotation costs, while unsupervised alternatives suffer from severe model collapse. Recent semi-supervised RLVR methods address this by using a small labeled set to guide unlabeled data, achieving a promising trade-off between training efficacy and annotation cost. However, they suffer from a severe data-efficiency bottleneck due to the reliance on coarse performance heuristics, leaving a vast majority of valuable instances underutilized. To this end, we propose GeoMin, which models global feature distributions on labeled data to decode the structural discrepancy between correct and incorrect rollouts, thereby establishing a robust prior to assess the reliability of self-reward signals and fully unleash the potential of unlabeled data. Empirically, GeoMin outperforms the strongest baselines by +4.1% and even surpasses fully supervised models with only 10% of the annotations, demonstrating remarkable data efficiency.