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JustRL: Scaling a 1.5B LLM with a Simple RL Recipe (arxiv.org)
1 point by simonpure 285 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Trains a small reasoning model in one straightforward reinforcement-learning stage with settings that never change, instead of the usual multi-stage schedules and curricula. It beat complex pipelines on math tests using half the compute, and common extra tricks only made it worse.

Abstract

Recent advances in reinforcement learning for large language models have converged on increasing complexity: multi-stage training pipelines, dynamic hyperparameter schedules, and curriculum learning strategies. This raises a fundamental question: \textbf{Is this complexity necessary?} We present \textbf{JustRL}, a minimal approach using single-stage training with fixed hyperparameters that achieves state-of-the-art performance on two 1.5B reasoning models (54.9\% and 64.3\% average accuracy across nine mathematical benchmarks) while using 2$\times$ less compute than sophisticated approaches. The same hyperparameters transfer across both models without tuning, and training exhibits smooth, monotonic improvement over 4,000+ steps without the collapses or plateaus that typically motivate interventions. Critically, ablations reveal that adding ``standard tricks'' like explicit length penalties and robust verifiers may degrade performance by collapsing exploration. These results suggest that the field may be adding complexity to solve problems that disappear with a stable, scaled-up baseline. We release our models and code to establish a simple, validated baseline for the community.

Bingxiang He, Zekai Qu, Zeyuan Liu, Yinghao Chen, Yuxin Zuo, Cheng Qian, Kaiyan Zhang, Weize Chen, Chaojun Xiao, Ganqu Cui, Ning Ding, Zhiyuan Liu
arXiv:2512.16649 · cs.CL · submitted Dec 18, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · 12 pages, 3 figures

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