What is the objective of reasoning with reinforcement learning?

Damek Davis; Benjamin Recht

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arXiv · 2510.13651

What is the objective of reasoning with reinforcement learning?

Damek Davis·Benjamin Recht

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Abstract

We show that several popular algorithms for reinforcement learning in large language models with binary rewards can be viewed as stochastic gradient ascent on a monotone transform of the probability of a correct answer given a prompt. In particular, the transformation associated with rejection sampling algorithms is the logarithm and that associated with the GRPO algorithm is the arcsine of the square root.

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Damek Davis, Benjamin Recht. 2025-10-15. What is the objective of reasoning with reinforcement learning?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13651

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