SwS: Self-aware Weakness-driven Problem Synthesis in Reinforcement
  Learning for LLM Reasoning
Authors: name: Xiao Liang; name: Zhong-Zhi Li; name: Yeyun Gong; name: Yang Wang; name: Hengyuan Zhang; name: Yelong Shen; name: Ying Nian Wu; name: Weizhu Chen
Published: 2025-06-10 17:02:00

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective
for training large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks, such as
mathematical problem solving. A prerequisite for the scalability of RLVR is a
high-quality problem set with precise and verifiable answers. However, the
scarcity of well-crafted human-labeled math problems and limited-verification
answers in existing distillation-oriented synthetic datasets limit their
effectiveness in RL. Additionally, most problem synthesis strategies
indiscriminately expand the problem set without considering the model's
capabilities, leading to low efficiency in generating useful questions. To
mitigate this issue, we introduce a Self-aware Weakness-driven problem
Synthesis framework (SwS) that systematically identifies model deficiencies and
leverages them for problem augmentation. Specifically, we define weaknesses as
questions that the model consistently fails to learn through its iterative
sampling during RL training. We then extract the core concepts from these
failure cases and synthesize new problems to strengthen the model's weak areas
in subsequent augmented training, enabling it to focus on and gradually
overcome its weaknesses. Without relying on external knowledge distillation,
our framework enables robust generalization byempowering the model to
self-identify and address its weaknesses in RL, yielding average performance
gains of 10.0% and 7.7% on 7B and 32B models across eight mainstream reasoning
benchmarks.