Teaching LLMs to Plan, Not Just Solve: Plan Learning Boosts LLMs Generalization in Reasoning Tasks

Reinforcement learning (RL) on self-generated data has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving reasoning in large language models (LLMs).However, RL relies on accurate reward signals, which are scarce in many domains, making it critical to train models that can generalize to unseen problems.Existing methods often focus on task-specific or domainspecific reasoning, lacking consideration for generalization and may degrade performance on other tasks.To address this, we distinguish between abstract plans, representing high-level problem-solving strategies, and concrete solutions, proposing that learning plans develops transferable general reasoning capabilities and promotes better generalization.Building on this insight, we propose PlanLearn, a framework that combines plan-based search with Step-level Advantage Preference Optimization (Step-APO) to optimize plan learning.Experimental results show that PlanLearn, trained exclusively on GSM8K and MATH, not only significantly improves in-domain performance but also enhances out-of-domain benchmarks, such as HumanEval (+12.2%),GPQA (+8.6%),ARC-C (+4.0%),MMLU-STEM (+2.2%), and BBH (+1.8%).The code is available at https: //github.com/tianlwang/PlanLearn.