VCRL: Variance-based Curriculum Reinforcement Learning for Large
  Language Models
Authors: name: Guochao Jiang; name: Wenfeng Feng; name: Guofeng Quan; name: Chuzhan Hao; name: Yuewei Zhang; name: Guohua Liu; name: Hao Wang
Published: 2025-09-24 06:38:58

Abstract: Policy-based reinforcement learning currently plays an important role in
improving LLMs on mathematical reasoning tasks. However, existing rollout-based
reinforcement learning methods (GRPO, DAPO, GSPO, etc.) fail to explicitly
consider LLMs' learning ability for samples of different difficulty levels,
which is contrary to the human cognitive process of mathematical reasoning
tasks from easy to difficult. Intuitively, we find that the variance of the
rollout group's reward in RLVR partly reflects the difficulty of the current
sample for LLMs. Samples that are too easy or too difficult have a lower
variance, while samples with moderate difficulty have a higher variance. Based
on this, we propose VCRL, a curriculum reinforcement learning framework that
dynamically controls the difficulty of training samples based on the variance
of group rewards. Experiments on five mathematical benchmarks and two models
reveal the advantages of VCRL over the current LLM RL baselines.