Understanding Enrichment in Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

When rewards are sparse, reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) often uses hints or intermediate guidance to generate more successful rollouts. This enrichment biases policy-gradient updates unless corrected via importance weights, but existing methods omit correction or truncate importance weights in order to avoid the high variance of correction. It thus remains unclear what exactly is gained or lost in RLVR by correcting enriched rollouts. We show, mathematically, that omitted or truncated correction implicitly reweights the defined reward, and we decompose the resulting gradient error into scale, rotation, and variance to explain their distinct effects on learning. To make correction practical, we develop a novel sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) weight correction mechanism that, under stability and particle-order assumptions, tempers the exponential compounding of standard correction variance over the length of a sample to an additive accumulation. We then apply our analysis of enrichment to interpreting the results of a fine-tune of Qwen3-1.7B on a sparse band of OpenMathReasoning, establishing a concrete mechanism of how enrichment, both corrected and uncorrected, helps avoid collapse in sparse domains. Our main contribution is to understand, in general, how enrichment and correction can affect training, as opposed to claiming that either mode of operation is superior to unenriched RL.