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Implicit Actor Critic Coupling via a Supervised Learning Framework for RLVR (arxiv.org)
38 points by getnormality 363 days ago | hide | past | pdf | 10 comments on HN

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

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> 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.

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.

59.76% on AIME is really appealing. Without having had time to understand it and determine whether it's useful or not, I see this number as indicating that this could be a stepping stone on something like the o1-to-DeepSeek-R1 progression for thinking, where open source models eventually figured out how o1 worked, only for the less definite 'o1' and instead what Google achieved and OpenAI may have achieved on the 2025 IMO problems.
I stumbled across this AI paper just now. It sounds intimidatingly technical, but if you read the abstract and look at Figures 1 and 2 and Equation 6, I think it's got some neat and accessible conceptual ideas.

Supervised learning is a much more mature technology than reinforcement learning, so it seems like a good thing to leverage that.

Can somebody explain "Base" model in the charts? Are they saying that the original model (e.g. before they applied either their or comparable training methods) has better or similar performance on all benchmarks vs their own result?
Is this DPO?
I have no idea. My understanding of this entire field is extremely superficial. I only posted this because I was able to sort of understand the paper despite that.

I can tell you that they cite the DPO paper right before Equation 8.

I think you meant to link to

Implicit Actor Critic Coupling via a Supervised Learning Framework for RLVR https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02522

not

Winning Gold at IMO 2025 with a Model-Agnostic Verification-and-Refinement Pipeline https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15855

We've changed the top link to that from https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15855. Thanks!
That paper is really cool too though. I'm happy that your comment sort of records the old link, because I only saw the right paper.
Ack, thank you.