Title: CDE: Curiosity-Driven Exploration for Efficient Reinforcement Learning in Large Language Models
Primary area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs
Keywords: Large language models, Reasoning, Exploration

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet current RLVR methods often explore poorly, leading to premature convergence and entropy collapse. Moreover, they tend to produce poorly calibrated policies that remain confident in their generations regardless of correctness. To address this challenge, we introduce **Curiosity-Driven Exploration (CDE)**, a framework that leverages the model's intrinsic sense of curiosity to guide exploration. We formalize curiosity with signals from both the actor and the critic: for the actor, we use perplexity over its generated response, and for the critic, we use the variance of value estimates from a multi-head critic architecture. Both signals serve as an exploration bonus within the RLVR framework to guide the model. Our theoretical analysis shows that the actor-wise bonus inherently penalizes overconfident errors and promotes diversity among correct responses; moreover, we connect the critic-wise bonus to the well-established count-based exploration bonus in RL. Empirically, our method achieves an approximate **+3** point improvement over standard RLVR using GRPO/PPO on AIME benchmarks.