Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning in Large Language Models with One Training Example
Paper · 2025 · Yiping Wang, Qing Yang, Zhiyuan Zeng et al.
Summary
The paper asks how small a training set can be for reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR). RLVR is the outcome-rewarded RL now used to strengthen math reasoning in LLMs. The authors draw a random sample of 1,209 problems from the DeepScaleR dataset (DSR-sub). They rank each problem by how much its training accuracy fluctuated across epochs of a preliminary full-data run. They then train with GRPO, and also PPO, on just one or two of these problems. With a single problem, Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B rises on MATH500 from 36.0% to 73.6%, essentially matching training on all of DSR-sub. Two problems do slightly better. The gains carry over to Qwen2.5-Math-7B, Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, transfer across math topics, and even help on ARC. Test scores keep rising long after the model has fully memorised its lone training problem. Ablations show the policy-gradient term drives the effect rather than weight decay, so it is not grokking. An entropy bonus aids exploration. The results suggest base models already contain latent reasoning ability and that data selection for RLVR deserves closer study.
Key points
- On Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B, one example (π13) lifts the six-benchmark average from 17.6% to 35.7%, versus 35.9% for the 1.2k DSR-sub. This is about 7.0 points beyond what format correction alone gives. Two examples {π1, π13} reach 74.8% on MATH500 and 36.6% on average, close to the full 7.5k MATH train set (36.7%).
- The six benchmarks are MATH500, AIME24, AMC23, Minerva Math, OlympiadBench and AIME25. On ARC-Easy, 1-shot training on π13 scores 55.8%, compared with 51.6% for full MATH-set RLVR.
- The authors call the continued test gains after training accuracy saturates "post-saturation generalization." Overfitting appears only after roughly 1.4k steps. Even then, the model's outputs on the training item turn into multilingual gibberish, while its test outputs stay readable and accurate.
- Training with policy-gradient loss alone already comes close to the full GRPO loss. Adding a suitably weighted entropy loss gives a further +4.0 points on MATH500 and +2.5 on AIME24. Entropy loss with no reward at all still yields a smaller boost (MATH500: 63.4%, versus 65.0% for the format-reward baseline).
- Many individual problems, including ones with low variance scores, work for 1-shot RLVR. Slightly incorrect labels do little harm. Code, models and data are released at github.com/ypwang61/One-Shot-RLVR.
Institutions
Fields, topics and concepts
📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksArtificial Intelligence · 17,965 worksArts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 works
🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.Language models & pretraining · 3,894 worksReasoning · 1,685 works
Cite
Cite as Yiping Wang, Qing Yang, Zhiyuan Zeng, Liliang Ren, Liyuan Liu, Baolin Peng, Hao Cheng, Xuehai He, Kuan Wang, Jianfeng Gao, Weizhu Chen, Shuohang Wang, Simon Shaolei Du and Yelong Shen. 2025. Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning in Large Language Models with One Training Example. arXiv:2504.20571.
@misc{wang2025reinforcement,
title = {{Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning in Large Language Models with One Training Example}},
author = {Yiping Wang, Qing Yang, Zhiyuan Zeng, Liliang Ren, Liyuan Liu, Baolin Peng, Hao Cheng, Xuehai He, Kuan Wang, Jianfeng Gao, Weizhu Chen, Shuohang Wang, Simon Shaolei Du and Yelong Shen},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2504.20571},
eprint = {2504.20571},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2504.20571}
}References
- OpenAI. Learning to reason with llms. https://openai.com/index/ learning-to-reason-with-llms/, 2024. Accessed: 2025-04-10. ↗
- Daya Guo, Dejian Yang, Haowei Zhang, Junxiao Song, Ruoyu Zhang, Runxin Xu, Qihao Zhu, Shirong Ma, Peiyi Wang, Xiao Bi, et al. Deepseek-r1: Incentivizing reasoning capability in llms via reinforcement learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.12948, 2025.
- Kimi Team, Angang Du, Bofei Gao, Bowei Xing, Changjiu Jiang, Cheng Chen, Cheng Li, Chenjun Xiao, Chenzhuang Du, Chonghua Liao, et al. Kimi k1. 5: Scaling reinforcement learning with llms. arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.12599, 2025.
- Jiaxuan Gao, Shusheng Xu, Wenjie Ye, Weilin Liu, Chuyi He, Wei Fu, Zhiyu Mei, Guangju Wang, and Yi Wu. On designing effective rl reward at training time for llm reasoning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.15115, 2024. — [arXiv:2410.15115](https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.15115) find
- Nathan Lambert, Jacob Morrison, Valentina Pyatkin, Shengyi Huang, Hamish Ivison, Faeze Brahman, Lester James V. Miranda, Alisa Liu, Nouha Dziri, Shane Lyu, Yuling Gu, Saumya Malik, Victoria Graf, Jena D. Hwang, Jiangjiang Yang, Ronan Le Bras, Oyvind Tafjord, Chris Wilhelm, Luca Soldaini, Noah A. Smi… — Tulu 3: Pushing Frontiers in Open Language Model Post-Training
- Kanishk Gandhi, Ayush Chakravarthy, Anikait Singh, Nathan Lile, and Noah D Goodman. Cognitive behaviors that enable self-improving reasoners, or, four habits of highly effective stars. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.01307, 2025.
- John Schulman, Filip Wolski, Prafulla Dhariwal, Alec Radford, and Oleg Klimov. Proximal policy optimization algorithms. arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.06347, 2017. find
- Zhihong Shao, Peiyi Wang, Qihao Zhu, Runxin Xu, Junxiao Song, Xiao Bi, Haowei Zhang, Mingchuan Zhang, YK Li, Y Wu, et al. Deepseekmath: Pushing the limits of mathematical reasoning in open language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.03300, 2024.
- Amirhossein Kazemnejad, Milad Aghajohari, Eva Portelance, Alessandro Sordoni, Siva Reddy, Aaron Courville, and Nicolas Le Roux. Vineppo: Unlocking rl potential for llm reasoning through refined credit assignment. arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.01679, 2024.
- Yufeng Yuan, Yu Yue, Ruofei Zhu, Tiantian Fan, and Lin Yan. What’s behind ppo’s collapse in long-cot? value optimization holds the secret. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.01491, 2025. — [arXiv:2503.01491](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01491) find
- Qiying Yu, Zheng Zhang, Ruofei Zhu, Yufeng Yuan, Xiaochen Zuo, Yu Yue, Tiantian Fan, Gaohong Liu, Lingjun Liu, Xin Liu, et al. Dapo: An open-source llm reinforcement learning system at scale. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.14476, 2025.
- Yufeng Yuan, Qiying Yu, Xiaochen Zuo, Ruofei Zhu, Wenyuan Xu, Jiaze Chen, Chengyi Wang, TianTian Fan, Zhengyin Du, Xiangpeng Wei, et al. Vapo: Efficient and reliable reinforcement learning for advanced reasoning tasks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.05118, 2025.
- Zichen Liu, Changyu Chen, Wenjun Li, Penghui Qi, Tianyu Pang, Chao Du, Wee Sun Lee, and Min Lin. Understanding r1-zero-like training: A critical perspective. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.20783, 2025.
- Michael Luo, Sijun Tan, Roy Huang, Xiaoxiang Shi, Rachel Xin, Colin Cai, Ameen Patel, Alpay Ariyak, Qingyang Wu, Ce Zhang, Li Erran Li, Raluca Ada Popa, and Ion Stoica. Deepcoder: A fully open-source 14b coder at o3-mini level. https://pretty-radio-b75.notion.site/ DeepCoder-A-Fully-Open-Source-14B-… ↗
- Jian Hu. Reinforce++: A simple and efficient approach for aligning large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.03262, 2025.
- Xiaojiang Zhang, Jinghui Wang, Zifei Cheng, Wenhao Zhuang, Zheng Lin, Minglei Zhang, Shaojie Wang, Yinghan Cui, Chao Wang, Junyi Peng, Shimiao Jiang, Shiqi Kuang, Shouyu Yin, Chaohang Wen, Haotian Zhang, Bin Chen, and Bing Yu. Srpo: A cross-domain implementation of large-scale reinforcement learning… find
- Jia LI, Edward Beeching, Lewis Tunstall, Ben Lipkin, Roman Soletskyi, Shengyi Costa Huang, Kashif Rasul, Longhui Yu, Albert Jiang, Ziju Shen, Zihan Qin, Bin Dong, Li Zhou, Yann Fleureau, Guillaume Lample, and Stanislas Polu. Numinamath. [https://huggingface.co/AI-MO/NuminaMath-CoT](https://github.co… find
- Michael Luo, Sijun Tan, Justin Wong, Xiaoxiang Shi, William Y. Tang, Manan Roongta, Colin Cai, Jeffrey Luo, Li Erran Li, Raluca Ada Popa, and Ion Stoica. Deepscaler: Surpassing o1-preview with a 1.5b model by scaling rl. https://pretty-radio-b75.notion.site/ DeepScaleR-Surpassing-O1-Preview-with-a-1… ↗
- Xuefeng Li, Haoyang Zou, and Pengfei Liu. Limr: Less is more for rl scaling, 2025. find
- Yang Yue, Zhiqi Chen, Rui Lu, Andrew Zhao, Zhaokai Wang, Yang Yue, Shiji Song, and Gao Huang. Does reinforcement learning really incentivize reasoning capacity in llms beyond the base model? arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.13837, 2025. Submitted on April 18, 2025.
- Darsh J Shah, Peter Rushton, Somanshu Singla, Mohit Parmar, Kurt Smith, Yash Vanjani, Ashish Vaswani, Adarsh Chaluvaraju, Andrew Hojel, Andrew Ma, et al. Rethinking reflection in pre-training. arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.04022, 2025.
- Guangming Sheng, Chi Zhang, Zilingfeng Ye, Xibin Wu, Wang Zhang, Ru Zhang, Yanghua Peng, Haibin Lin, and Chuan Wu. Hybridflow: A flexible and efficient rlhf framework. arXiv preprint arXiv: 2409.19256, 2024.
- Noam Razin, Zixuan Wang, Hubert Strauss, Stanley Wei, Jason D Lee, and Sanjeev Arora. What makes a reward model a good teacher? an optimization perspective. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.15477, 2025. — [arXiv:2503.15477](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15477) find
- An Yang, Baosong Yang, Beichen Zhang, Binyuan Hui, Bo Zheng, Bowen Yu, Chengyuan Li, Dayiheng Liu, Fei Huang, Haoran Wei, Huan Lin, Jian Yang, Jianhong Tu, Jianwei Zhang, Jianxin Yang, Jiaxi Yang, Jingren Zhou, Junyang Lin, Kai Dang, Keming Lu, Keqin Bao, Kexin Yang, Le Yu, Mei Li, Mingfeng Xue, Pei… find
- An Yang, Beichen Zhang, Binyuan Hui, Bofei Gao, Bowen Yu, Chengpeng Li, Dayiheng Liu, Jianhong Tu, Jingren Zhou, Junyang Lin, et al. Qwen2. 5-math technical report: Toward mathematical expert model via self-improvement. arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.12122, 2024.
- Aaron Grattafiori, Abhimanyu Dubey, Abhinav Jauhri, Abhinav Pandey, Abhishek Kadian, Ahmad Al-Dahle, Aiesha Letman, Akhil Mathur, Alan Schelten, Alex Vaughan, et al. The llama 3 herd of models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.21783, 2024.
- Dan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Saurav Kadavath, Akul Arora, Steven Basart, Eric Tang, Dawn Song, and Jacob Steinhardt. Measuring mathematical problem solving with the math dataset. arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.03874, 2021.
- Woosuk Kwon, Zhuohan Li, Siyuan Zhuang, Ying Sheng, Lianmin Zheng, Cody Hao Yu, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Hao Zhang, and Ion Stoica. Efficient memory management for large language model serving with pagedattention. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 29th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 2023.
- Hunter Lightman, Vineet Kosaraju, Yura Burda, Harri Edwards, Bowen Baker, Teddy Lee, Jan Leike, John Schulman, Ilya Sutskever, and Karl Cobbe. Let’s verify step by step. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.20050, 2023.
- Art of Problem Solving. Aime problems and solutions. https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/AIME_Problems_and_Solutions. Accessed: 2025-04-20. ↗
- Art of Problem Solving. Amc problems and solutions. https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php?title=AMC_Problems_and_Solutions. Accessed: 2025-04-20. ↗
- Aitor Lewkowycz, Anders Andreassen, David Dohan, Ethan Dyer, Henryk Michalewski, Vinay Ramasesh, Ambrose Slone, Cem Anil, Imanol Schlag, Theo Gutman-Solo, et al. Solving quantitative reasoning problems with language models. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 35:3843–3857, 2022.
- Chaoqun He, Renjie Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Shengding Hu, Zhen Leng Thai, Junhao Shen, Jinyi Hu, Xu Han, Yujie Huang, Yuxiang Zhang, et al. Olympiadbench: A challenging benchmark for promoting agi with olympiad-level bilingual multimodal scientific problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.14008, 2024.
- Peter Clark, Isaac Cowhey, Oren Etzioni, Tushar Khot, Ashish Sabharwal, Carissa Schoenick, and Oyvind Tafjord. Think you have solved question answering? try arc, the ai2 reasoning challenge. arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.05457, 2018.
- Zhiyuan Zeng, Yizhong Wang, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, and Pang Wei Koh. Evaltree: Profiling language model weaknesses via hierarchical capability trees. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.08893, 2025. — [arXiv:2503.08893](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08893) find
- Alethea Power, Yuri Burda, Harri Edwards, Igor Babuschkin, and Vedant Misra. Grokking: Generalization beyond overfitting on small algorithmic datasets. arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.02177, 2022.
- Simin Fan, Razvan Pascanu, and Martin Jaggi. Deep grokking: Would deep neural networks generalize better? arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.19454, 2024. — [arXiv:2405.19454](https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.19454) find
- Neel Nanda, Lawrence Chan, Tom Lieberum, Jess Smith, and Jacob Steinhardt. Progress measures for grokking via mechanistic interpretability. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.05217, 2023.
- Ziming Liu, Ouail Kitouni, Niklas S Nolte, Eric Michaud, Max Tegmark, and Mike Williams. Towards understanding grokking: An effective theory of representation learning. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 35:34651–34663, 2022. find
- Branton DeMoss, Silvia Sapora, Jakob Foerster, Nick Hawes, and Ingmar Posner. The complexity dynamics of grokking. arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.09810, 2024. — [arXiv:2412.09810](https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09810) find
- Lucas Prieto, Melih Barsbey, Pedro AM Mediano, and Tolga Birdal. Grokking at the edge of numerical stability. arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.04697, 2025. — [arXiv:2501.04697](https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04697) find
- Weihao Zeng, Yuzhen Huang, Qian Liu, Wei Liu, Keqing He, Zejun Ma, and Junxian He. Simplerl-zoo: Investigating and taming zero reinforcement learning for open base models in the wild. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.18892, 2025.
- Liang Wen, Yunke Cai, Fenrui Xiao, Xin He, Qi An, Zhenyu Duan, Yimin Du, Junchen Liu, Lifu Tang, Xiaowei Lv, et al. Light-r1: Curriculum sft, dpo and rl for long cot from scratch and beyond. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.10460, 2025.
- Mingyang Song, Mao Zheng, Zheng Li, Wenjie Yang, Xuan Luo, Yue Pan, and Feng Zhang. Fastcurl: Curriculum reinforcement learning with progressive context extension for efficient training r1-like reasoning models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.17287, 2025. — [arXiv:2503.17287](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17287) find
- Andrew Zhao, Yiran Wu, Yang Yue, Tong Wu, Quentin Xu, Matthieu Lin, Shenzhi Wang, Qingyun Wu, Zilong Zheng, and Gao Huang. Absolute zero: Reinforced self-play reasoning with zero data. arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.03335, 2025.
- Qingyang Zhang, Haitao Wu, Changqing Zhang, Peilin Zhao, and Yatao Bian. Right question is already half the answer: Fully unsupervised llm reasoning incentivization. arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.05812, 2025. find
- Yuxin Zuo, Kaiyan Zhang, Shang Qu, Li Sheng, Xuekai Zhu, Biqing Qi, Youbang Sun, Ganqu Cui, Ning Ding, and Bowen Zhou. Ttrl: Test-time reinforcement learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.16084, 2025.
- Hamish Ivison, Muru Zhang, Faeze Brahman, Pang Wei Koh, and Pradeep Dasigi. Large-scale data selection for instruction tuning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.01807, 2025. — [arXiv:2503.01807](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01807) find
- Lichang Chen, Shiyang Li, Jun Yan, Hai Wang, Kalpa Gunaratna, Vikas Yadav, Zheng Tang, Vijay Srinivasan, Tianyi Zhou, Heng Huang, and Hongxia Jin. Alpagasus: Training a better alpaca with fewer data. In International Conference on Learning Representations, 2024.
- Hamish Ivison, Noah A. Smith, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, and Pradeep Dasigi. Data-efficient finetuning using cross-task nearest neighbors. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023. find
- Mengzhou Xia, Sadhika Malladi, Suchin Gururangan, Sanjeev Arora, and Danqi Chen. LESS: selecting influential data for targeted instruction tuning. In International Conference on Machine Learning, 2024.
- William Muldrew, Peter Hayes, Mingtian Zhang, and David Barber. Active preference learning for large language models. In International Conference on Machine Learning, 2024. find
- Zijun Liu, Boqun Kou, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, and Yang Liu. Enabling weak llms to judge response reliability via meta ranking. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.12146, 2024. — [arXiv:2402.12146](https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12146) find
- Nirjhar Das, Souradip Chakraborty, Aldo Pacchiano, and Sayak Ray Chowdhury. Active preference optimization for sample efficient rlhf. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.10500, 2024. — [arXiv:2402.10500](https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10500) find
- Long Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida, Carroll Wainwright, Pamela Mishkin, Chong Zhang, Sandhini Agarwal, Katarina Slama, Alex Ray, et al. Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2022.
- Mehdi Fatemi, Banafsheh Rafiee, Mingjie Tang, and Kartik Talamadupula. Concise reasoning via reinforcement learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.05185, 2025. — [arXiv:2504.05185](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05185) find
- J. Schulman. Approximating kl divergence. http://joschu.net/blog/kl-approx.html, 2020. 2025. ↗
- Bofei Gao, Feifan Song, Zhe Yang, Zefan Cai, Yibo Miao, Qingxiu Dong, Lei Li, Chenghao Ma, Liang Chen, Runxin Xu, et al. Omni-math: A universal olympiad level mathematic benchmark for large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.07985, 2024.
- Yingqian Min, Zhipeng Chen, Jinhao Jiang, Jie Chen, Jia Deng, Yiwen Hu, Yiru Tang, Jiapeng Wang, Xiaoxue Cheng, Huatong Song, et al. Imitate, explore, and self-improve: A reproduction report on slow-thinking reasoning systems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.09413, 2024.
- Jujie He, Jiacai Liu, Chris Yuhao Liu, Rui Yan, Chaojie Wang, Peng Cheng, Xiaoyu Zhang, Fuxiang Zhang, Jiacheng Xu, Wei Shen, Siyuan Li, Liang Zeng, Tianwen Wei, Cheng Cheng, Bo An, Yang Liu, and Yahui Zhou. Skywork open reasoner series. https://capricious-hydrogen-41c.notion.site/ Skywork-Open-Reao… ↗
- Jiawei Gu, Xuhui Jiang, Zhichao Shi, Hexiang Tan, Xuehao Zhai, Chengjin Xu, Wei Li, Yinghan Shen, Shengjie Ma, Honghao Liu, et al. A survey on llm-as-a-judge. arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.15594, 2024. find
- Qwen Team. Qwq-32b: Embracing the power of reinforcement learning, March 2025. find
- Qingxiu Dong, Lei Li, Damai Dai, Ce Zheng, Jingyuan Ma, Rui Li, Heming Xia, Jingjing Xu, Zhiyong Wu, Tianyu Liu, et al. A survey on in-context learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.00234, 2022.
- David Rolnick, Andreas Veit, Serge Belongie, and Nir Shavit. Deep learning is robust to massive label noise. arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.10694, 2017. — [arXiv:1705.10694](https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.10694) find
- Preetum Nakkiran, Gal Kaplun, Yamini Bansal, Tristan Yang, Boaz Barak, and Ilya Sutskever. Deep double descent: Where bigger models and more data hurt. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2021(12):124003, 2021. find
- Nitish Shirish Keskar, Dheevatsa Mudigere, Jorge Nocedal, Mikhail Smelyanskiy, and Ping Tak Peter Tang. On large-batch training for deep learning: Generalization gap and sharp minima. arXiv preprint arXiv: 1609.04836, 2016. find
- Samuel L. Smith, Benoit Dherin, David G. T. Barrett, and Soham De. On the origin of implicit regularization in stochastic gradient descent. Iclr, 2021. find
- Zihan Liu, Yang Chen, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, and Wei Ping. Acemath: Advancing frontier math reasoning with post-training and reward modeling. arXiv preprint, 2024. find
- Ziniu Li, Congliang Chen, Tian Xu, Zeyu Qin, Jiancong Xiao, Ruoyu Sun, and Zhi-Quan Luo. Entropic distribution matching for supervised fine-tuning of llms: Less overfitting and better diversity. In NeurIPS 2024 Workshop on Fine-Tuning in Modern Machine Learning: Principles and Scalability, 2024. Con… find
Updated
This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/wang-2025-reinforcement-learning-reasoning-large-language/