Reward Budgeting Reduces Premature Convergence in Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning

Abstract

RL for LLM reasoning often reaches an early performance plateau as the policy distribution becomes increasingly sharp. Recent work has studied policy entropy as both a diagnostic and a control signal for this behavior. In our experiments, however, increasing entropy alone does not reliably change the eventual plateau. We analyze RL through its implicit target policy and derive a sharpness factor $\kappa$, together with an effective counterpart $\kappa_{\mathrm{eff}}$, that describes how strongly reward or advantage gaps are translated into probability-ratio gaps. Motivated by this view, we introduce reward budgeting, a plug-in advantage construction that assigns a fixed total reward budget to each prompt. For binary rewards and independent on-policy rollouts, its unclipped score-function estimator follows the gradient of an exact finite-$G$ concave objective with diminishing returns, while its advantage gap decreases as more rollouts become correct. For general rewards, a shifted log-mean interpretation holds asymptotically under the stated regularity conditions. These results motivate, rather than establish exact objective equivalence for, the clipped implementations. On Qwen3-8B and Llama3.2-3B-Instruct, reward budgeting consistently improves a range of RL baselines, with gains up to +12.50 on AMC23 and +10.00 on AIME24 and AIME25. Overall, our results support an update-dynamics view of premature convergence and show that strong gains can be obtained without explicitly preserving entropy.