Consistent Paths Lead to Truth: Self-Rewarding Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning
Kongcheng Zhang, Qi Yao, Shunyu Liu, Yingjie Wang, Baisheng Lai, Jieping Ye, Mingli Song, Dacheng Tao
Abstract
Recent advances of Reinforcement Learning (RL) have highlighted its potential in complex reasoning tasks, yet effective training often relies on external supervision, which limits the broader applicability. In this work, we propose a novel self-rewarding reinforcement learning framework to enhance Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning by leveraging the consistency of intermediate reasoning states across different reasoning trajectories. Our key insight is that correct responses often exhibit consistent trajectory patterns in terms of model likelihood: their intermediate reasoning states tend to converge toward their own final answers (high consistency) with minimal deviation toward other candidates (low volatility). Inspired by this observation, we introduce CoVo, an intrinsic reward mechanism that integrates Consistency and Volatility via a robust vector-space aggregation strategy, complemented by a curiosity bonus to promote diverse exploration. CoVo enables LLMs to perform RL in a self-rewarding manner, offering a scalable pathway for learning to reason without external supervision. Extensive experiments on diverse reasoning benchmarks show that CoVo achieves performance comparable to or even surpassing supervised RL. Our code is available at https://github.com/sastpg/CoVo.
Ask about this paper
Your agent reads all of it.
Lune indexed this paper to the last equation, along with the top-tier papers that cite it. Ask a question and the answer quotes them.
Your agent calls
Luneget_paper_fulltext
Free to start. No credit card required.
Terminal
Install the CLIlune papers fulltext 83e7b7e6-221b-4ac3-a234-a3cc5e3316e1Cited by top-tier papers12
- R-Zero: Self-Evolving Reasoning LLM from Zero DataChengsong Huang, Wenhao Yu, Xiaoyang Wang, Hongming Zhang et al.ICLR 2026 · 220 citations
- Harnessing Uncertainty: Entropy-Modulated Policy Gradients for Long-Horizon LLM AgentsJiawei Wang, Jiacai Liu, Yuqian Fu, Yingru Li et al.ICML 2026 · 38 citations
- How Far Can Unsupervised RLVR Scale LLM Training?Bingxiang He, Yuxin Zuo, Zeyuan Liu, Shangziqi Zhao et al.ICLR 2026 · 31 citations
- Co-rewarding: Stable Self-supervised RL for Eliciting Reasoning in Large Language ModelsZizhuo Zhang, Jianing Zhu, Xinmu Ge, Zihua Zhao et al.ICLR 2026 · 16 citations
- Semantic Voting: A Self-Evaluation-Free Approach for Efficient LLM Self-Improvement on Unverifiable Open-ended TasksChunyang Jiang, Yonggang Zhang, Yiyang Cai, Chi-Min Chan et al.ICLR 2026 · 7 citations
Builds on30
- Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackLong Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 24,707 citations
- Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language ModelsJason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 22,562 citations
- Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward ModelRafael Rafailov, Archit Sharma, Eric Mitchell, Christopher D. Manning et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 10,924 citations
- Measuring Massive Multitask Language UnderstandingDan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Steven Basart, Andy Zou et al.ICLR 2021 · 7,905 citations
- Let's Verify Step by StepHunter Lightman, Vineet Kosaraju, Yuri Burda, Harrison Edwards et al.ICLR 2024 · 3,045 citations
Related papers
- Count Counts: Motivating Exploration in LLM Reasoning with Count-based Intrinsic RewardsXuan Zhang, Ruixiao Li, Zhijian Zhou, Long Li et al.ICLR 2026 · 11 citations
- Rectifying LLM Thought from Lens of OptimizationJunnan Liu, Hongwei Liu, Songyang Zhang, Kai ChenICLR 2026 · 3 citations
- Enhancing the Outcome Reward-based RL Training of MLLMs with Self-Consistency SamplingJiahao Wang, Weiye Xu, Aijun Yang, Wengang Zhou et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 4 citations
- Hybrid Latent Reasoning via Reinforcement LearningZhenrui Yue, Bowen Jin, Huimin Zeng, Honglei Zhuang et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 28 citations
- CDE: Curiosity-Driven Exploration for Efficient Reinforcement Learning in Large Language ModelsRunpeng Dai, Linfeng Song, Haolin Liu, Zhenwen Liang et al.ICLR 2026 · 29 citations
