Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become the cornerstone of aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intent. Yet a fundamental question remains unaddressed: how should training data be scheduled when both the model's capabilities and the utility of data are constantly evolving? Current pipelines rely on fixed or uniform sampling, treating data value as static, an assumption we demonstrate to be fundamentally flawed. We identify and formalize the Distribution-Value Coevolution principle: the training value of data is not intrinsic, but emerges dynamically from the interaction between data characteristics and the model's evolving capability boundary. What is highly informative at one stage may become redundant, or even detrimental, at another. This insight demands a paradigm shift from static to adaptive curriculum design. We operationalize this principle through a unified framework with three components: (1) distribution-level organization that groups training data into coherent distributions; (2) sliding-window influence estimation that continuously tracks each distribution's evolving training value; and (3) bandit-guided scheduling that adaptively allocates resources with provable exploration-exploitation guarantees. Experiments show that this approach yields measurable improvements, with up to a 57.1% relative (or 8.9% absolute) improvement on AIME24 for Llama3.2-3B, and gains also observed for models ranging from 1B to 7B parameters.
Zairun Yang, Yanbo Yang, Chenyi Zhou et al.· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM...· 0 citations
Reinforcement learning (RL) is used to improve the reasoning abilities of LLMs, while training data span heterogeneous tasks. However, most RL post-training pipelines rely on fixed or manually designed task mixtures, even though task usefulness changes as training progresses. Online curriculum methods often define learnability by update magnitude, ignoring whether the update translates into reward gains, which can misallocate rollout budget toward tasks with large but ineffective updates. We propose PAC, a Progress-Augmented Advantage Curriculum for multi-task RL of LLMs that combines two task-level signals: advantage-derived learnability, which measures the magnitude of the policy update a task can induce, and recent reward gains, which show whether those updates have improved task performance. A Bayesian Thompson Sampling controller uses these signals to allocate rollouts across tasks during GRPO training. We evaluate PAC under two settings: a multi-level reasoning setting and a multi-domain reasoning setting. PAC improves sample efficiency and final performance: it reaches comparable validation scores with fewer rollout steps and achieves higher final averages than random sampling and advantage-based curriculum baselines in both settings. These results show that jointly tracking advantage signals and actual reward gains yields an effective online curriculum for LLM post-training.
Yuan-Qiang Yu, Yan-Zhao Zheng, Zhen-Tao Zhang et al.· 0 citations