When Does Closed-Loop Curriculum Adaptation Help GRPO? An Analysis on Countdown

Abstract

Reinforcement fine-tuning has become an effective post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning ability of large language models, but it remains sample-inefficient when the training distribution is mismatched to the model's current capability. In group-relative objectives such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), problems that are too hard often produce uniformly failed rollouts, while problems that are too easy provide little useful advantage signal. In this work, we introduce CLOSEDLOOPGAUSSIAN, a lightweight adaptive curriculum method for efficient reinforcement fine-tuning on ordered reasoning tasks. Instead of following a fixed easy-to-hard schedule, CLOSEDLOOPGAUSSIAN preserves the structure of an Easy-to-Hard Gaussian sampler while dynamically adjusting its pace and spread using periodic probe estimates of per-difficulty accuracy. The controller accelerates training when the model is ahead of a reference curriculum, slows down when the model falls behind, and broadens sampling when earlier difficulties regress. This feedback mechanism keeps training focused on tasks that are challenging but still learnable, without changing the reward function, model architecture, or underlying GRPO optimizer. Experiments on symbolic arithmetic reasoning task show that CLOSEDLOOPGAUSSIAN improves exact-match accuracy over vanilla GRPO and fixed open-loop curricula, with the strongest gains in intermediate-difficulty regimes where group-relative learning signals are most informative. Codes are available at https://github.com/yuvrajpant56/Closed_Loop_Curriculum.