Exploring the Limit of Outcome Reward for Learning Mathematical
  Reasoning
Authors: name: Chengqi Lyu; name: Songyang Gao; name: Yuzhe Gu; name: Wenwei Zhang; name: Jianfei Gao; name: Kuikun Liu; name: Ziyi Wang; name: Shuaibin Li; name: Qian Zhao; name: Haian Huang; name: Weihan Cao; name: Jiangning Liu; name: Hongwei Liu; name: Junnan Liu; name: Songyang Zhang; name: Dahua Lin; name: Kai Chen
Published: 2025-02-10 18:57:29

Abstract: Reasoning abilities, especially those for solving complex math problems, are
crucial components of general intelligence. Recent advances by proprietary
companies, such as o-series models of OpenAI, have made remarkable progress on
reasoning tasks. However, the complete technical details remain unrevealed, and
the techniques that are believed certainly to be adopted are only reinforcement
learning (RL) and the long chain of thoughts. This paper proposes a new RL
framework, termed OREAL, to pursue the performance limit that can be achieved
through Outcome REwArd-based reinforcement
Learning for mathematical reasoning tasks, where only binary outcome
rewards are easily accessible. We theoretically prove that behavior cloning on
positive trajectories from best-of-N (BoN) sampling is sufficient to learn the
KL-regularized optimal policy in binary feedback environments. This formulation
further implies that the rewards of negative samples should be reshaped to
ensure the gradient consistency between positive and negative samples. To
alleviate the long-existing difficulties brought by sparse rewards in RL, which
are even exacerbated by the partial correctness of the long chain of thought
for reasoning tasks, we further apply a token-level reward model to sample
important tokens in reasoning trajectories for learning. With OREAL, for the
first time, a 7B model can obtain 94.0 pass@1 accuracy on MATH-500 through RL,
being on par with 32B models. OREAL-32B also surpasses previous 32B models
trained by distillation with 95.0 pass@1 accuracy on MATH-500. Our
investigation also indicates the importance of initial policy models and
training queries for RL. Code, models, and data will be released to benefit
future researchhttps://github.com/InternLM/OREAL.