SPIRAL: Self-Play on Zero-Sum Games Incentivizes Reasoning via
  Multi-Agent Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning
Authors: name: Bo Liu; name: Leon Guertler; name: Simon Yu; name: Zichen Liu; name: Penghui Qi; name: Daniel Balcells; name: Mickel Liu; name: Cheston Tan; name: Weiyan Shi; name: Min Lin; name: Wee Sun Lee; name: Natasha Jaques
Published: 2025-06-30 17:58:13

Abstract: Recent advances in reinforcement learning have shown that language models can
develop sophisticated reasoning through training on tasks with verifiable
rewards, but these approaches depend on human-curated problem-answer pairs and
domain-specific reward engineering. We introduce SPIRAL, a self-play framework
where models learn by playing multi-turn, zero-sum games against continuously
improving versions of themselves, eliminating the need for human supervision.
Through self-play, SPIRAL generates an infinite curriculum of progressively
challenging problems as models must constantly adapt to stronger opponents. To
enable this self-play training at scale, We implement a fully online,
multi-turn, multi-agent reinforcement learning system for LLMs and propose
role-conditioned advantage estimation (RAE) to stabilize multi-agent training.
Using SPIRAL, self-play on zero-sum games produces reasoning capabilities that
transfer broadly. Training Qwen3-4B-Base on Kuhn Poker alone achieves 8.6%
improvement on math and 8.4% on general reasoning, outperforming SFT on 25,000
expert game trajectories. Analysis reveals that this transfer occurs through
three cognitive patterns: systematic decomposition, expected value calculation,
and case-by-case analysis. Multi-game training (TicTacToe, Kuhn Poker, Simple
Negotiation) further enhances performance as each game develops distinct
reasoning strengths. Applying SPIRAL to a strong reasoning model
(DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B) can still lead to 2.0% average improvement. These
results demonstrate that zero-sum games naturally develop transferable
reasoning capabilities, highlighting a promising direction for autonomous
reasoning development.