Overconfident Errors Need Stronger Correction: Asymmetric Confidence Penalties for Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become the leading paradigm for enhancing reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, standard RLVR algorithms suffer from a well-documented pathology: while they improve Pass@1 accuracy through sharpened sampling, they simultaneously narrow the model’s reasoning boundary and reduce generation diversity. We identify a root cause that existing methods overlook: the uniform penalization of errors. Current approaches — whether data-filtering methods that select prompts by difficulty, or advantage normalization schemes — treat […]