In plain words: A model grades its own answers by picking the most common one among several tries, then trains on that signal instead of human labels. Reasoning and judging both improve over rounds, but long training collapses suddenly as the model games its own scoring.
Abstract
Recent successes of reinforcement learning (RL) in training large reasoning models motivate the question of whether self-training - the process where a model learns from its own judgments - can be sustained within RL. In this work, we study this question using majority voting as a simple self-feedback mechanism. On a comprehensive set of experiments on both synthetic and real reasoning tasks, we find that this basic approach improves not only the model's reasoning performance, but also its capability of generating better quality feedback for the next RL iteration, driving further model improvement. Yet our analysis also reveals a critical limitation of such a self-training paradigm - prolonged RL with self-reward leads to reward hacking where models learn to maximize training (pseudo-)reward, resulting in sudden and complete performance collapse. Together, these results highlight feedback design as the central challenge and call for future research on mechanisms to enable prolonged self-improvement.
Sheikh Shafayat, Fahim Tajwar, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Jeff Schneider, Andrea Zanette
arXiv:2505.21444 · cs.LG · submitted May 27, 2025 · updated Oct 8, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Project website: https://self-rewarding-llm-training.github.io/