Boosting LLM Exploration via Weak-Model Guidance in RLVR
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) significantly improves LLM reasoning but often causes a drop in policy entropy, leading to narrowed reasoning coverage and degraded pass@$k$ for large $k$. While existing methods mitigate this entropy collapse through algorithmic regularizations, cross-model non-parametric perturbation is also neglected. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective approach to preserve the generative diversity of LLMs during RLVR. Instead of relying solely on internal exploration, we force the target model to generate answers based on partial reasoning trajectories generated by a smaller, weaker language models. These unfamiliar prefixes effectively...
| Authors | Xingyu Shen, Huishuai Zhang, Peng Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 27 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 August 2026 |
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