In plain words: Instead of nudging a language model with reinforcement learning, this trains it to predict the final reward as a label, which works out to the same update but steadier. It beat reinforcement-learning training and open models, gaining about 9.6% over the 8-billion-parameter model.
Abstract
Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have empowered large language models (LLMs) to tackle challenging reasoning tasks such as mathematics and programming, however existing RLVR methods often suffer from sparse reward signals and unstable policy gradient updates inherent to RL-based approaches. To address the challenges, we propose PACS, a novel RLVR framework that achieves imPlicit Actor Critic coupling via a Supervised learning framework. By treating the outcome reward as a predictable label, we reformulate the RLVR problem into a supervised learning task over a score function parameterized by the policy model and optimized using cross-entropy loss. A detailed gradient analysis shows that this supervised formulation inherently recovers the classical policy gradient update while providing more stable and efficient training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PACS significantly outperforms strong open-source models and RLVR baselines, yielding substantial average gains of +8.26% (4B) and +9.57% (8B) over base models offering a promising avenue for LLMs post-training with verifiable rewards. Our code and data are available as open source at https://github.com/ritzz-ai/PACS.
Jiaming Li, Longze Chen, Ze Gong, Yukun Chen, Lu Wang, Wanwei He, Run Luo, Min Yang
arXiv:2509.02522 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Sep 2, 2025 · updated Jul 18, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · ICML 2026
Isn't this how the Decision Transformer works? I don't see it in the references, so I'll be curious to compare the papers in more depth.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01345
> By conditioning an autoregressive model on the desired return (reward), past states, and actions, our Decision Transformer model can generate future actions that achieve the desired return.
Lately it has crossed my mind that I haven't seen DT brought up much lately, it seemed really interesting when it was first published but I haven't read much follow-up work.