Towards High Data Efficiency in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward
Xinyu Tang, Zhenduo Zhang, Yurou Liu, Xin Zhao, Zujie Wen, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jun Zhou
Abstract
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have utilized reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to improve reasoning capabilities. However, scaling these methods typically requires massive data and extensive rollout computations, leading to high training costs and low data efficiency. To mitigate this issue, we propose DEPO, a Data-Efficient Policy Optimization approach that combines optimized strategies for both offline and online data selection. In the offline phase, we curate a high-quality subset of training data based on multiple objectives, including diversity, influence, and difficulty. During online RLVR training, we propose a sample-level explorability metric to dynamically filter out samples with low exploration potential, thereby reducing substantial rollout computational costs. Additionally, we employ a replay mechanism for under-explored samples to ensure sufficient training, which enhances the final convergence performance. Experiments on five reasoning benchmarks show that DEPO consistently outperforms existing methods in both offline and online data selection scenarios. Notably, using only 20% of the training data, our approach achieves a 1.85 speed-up on AIME24 and a 1.66 speed-up on AIME25 compared to GRPO trained on the full dataset.
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 c24ba70e-ead1-404e-930d-80375a8a67fdCited by top-tier papers4
- Detecting Data Contamination from Reinforcement Learning Post-training for Large Language ModelsYongding Tao, Tian Wang, Yihong Dong, Huanyu Liu et al.ICLR 2026 · 5 citations
- Beyond Majority Voting: Towards Fine-grained and More Reliable Reward Signal for Test-Time Reinforcement LearningWeiqin Wang, Yile Wang, Kehao Chen, Hui HuangACL 2026 · 5 citations
- Reinforced Informativeness Optimization for Long-Form Retrieval-Augmented GenerationYuhao Wang, Ruiyang Ren, Yucheng Wang, Xin Zhao et al.ACL 2026 · 4 citations
- EDCO: Dynamic Curriculum Orchestration for Domain-specific Large Language Model Fine-tuningJing-Cheng Pang, Sun Liu, Chang Zhou, Xian Tang et al.ICML 2026
Builds on13
- Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackLong Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 24,707 citations
- DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at ScaleQiying Yu, Zheng Zhang, Ruofei Zhu, Yufeng Yuan et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 2,828 citations
- Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttentionWoosuk Kwon, Zhuohan Li, Siyuan Zhuang, Ying Sheng et al.SOSP 2023 · 1,016 citations
- Beyond the 80/20 Rule: High-Entropy Minority Tokens Drive Effective Reinforcement Learning for LLM ReasoningShenzhi Wang, Le Yu, Chang Gao, Chujie Zheng et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 592 citations
- Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning in Large Language Models with One Training ExampleYiping Wang, Qing Yang, Zhiyuan Zeng, Liliang Ren et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 314 citations
Related papers
- Resource-Efficient Reinforcement for Reasoning Large Language Models via Dynamic One-Shot Policy RefinementYunjian Zhang, Sudong Wang, Yang Li, Peiran Xu et al.ICML 2026 · 4 citations
- Improving Data Efficiency for LLM Reinforcement Fine-tuning Through Difficulty-targeted Online Data Selection and Rollout ReplayYifan Sun, Jingyan Shen, Yibin Wang, Tianyu Chen et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 63 citations
- Prune as You Generate: Online Rollout Pruning for Faster and Better RLVRHaobo Xu, Sirui Chen, Ruizhong Qiu, Yuchen Yan et al.ACL 2026 · 6 citations
- Experience Augmented Policy Optimization for LLM ReasoningJinda Lu, Kexin Huang, Junkang Wu, Shuo Yang et al.ICML 2026 · 2 citations
- Accelerating RL for LLM Reasoning with Optimal Advantage RegressionKianté Brantley, Mingyu Chen, Zhaolin Gao, Jason D. Lee et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 31 citations
