h1: Bootstrapping LLMs to Reason over Longer Horizons via Reinforcement Learning
Large language models excel at short-horizon reasoning tasks, but performance drops as reasoning horizon lengths increase. Existing approaches to combat this rely on inference-time scaffolding or costly step-level supervision, neither of which scales easily. In this work, we introduce a scalable method to bootstrap long-horizon reasoning capabilities using only existing, abundant short-horizon data. Our approach synthetically composes simple problems into complex, multi-step dependency chains of arbitrary length. We train models on this data using outcome-only rewards under a curriculum that automatically increases in complexity, allowing RL training to be scaled much further without saturating. Empirically, our method generalizes remarkably well: curriculum training on composed 6th-grade level math problems (GSM8K) boosts accuracy on longer, competition-level benchmarks (GSM-Symbolic, MATH-500, AIME) by up to 2.06x. It also transfers significantly to diverse out-of-distribution ReasoningGym domains and long-context benchmarks, indicating broader generalization. Importantly, our long-horizon improvements are significantly higher than baselines even at high pass@k, showing that models can learn new reasoning paths under RL. Theoretically, we show that curriculum RL with outcome rewards achieves an exponential improvement in sample complexity over full-horizon training, providing training signal comparable to dense supervision. h1 therefore introduces an efficient path towards scaling RL for long-horizon problems using only existing data.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Reinforcement LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Reasoning Cache: Continual Improvement Over Long Horizons via Short-Horizon RL
Large Language Models (LLMs) that can continually improve beyond their training budgets are able to solve increasingly difficult problems by adapting at test time, a property we refer to as extrapolation. However, standa…
Reinforcement LearningResponse GenerationEnhancing Chain-of-Thoughts Prompting with Iterative Bootstrapping in Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) can achieve highly effective performance on various reasoning tasks by incorporating step-by-step chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting as demonstrations. However, the reasoning chains of demonstr…
Flattening Hierarchies with Policy Bootstrapping
Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) is a promising approach for pretraining generalist policies on large datasets of reward-free trajectories, akin to the self-supervised objectives used to train found…
Scaling Optimal LR Across Token Horizons
State-of-the-art LLMs are powered by scaling -- scaling model size, dataset size and cluster size. It is economically infeasible to extensively tune hyperparameter for the largest runs. Instead, approximately optimal hyp…
Language Agents Meet Causality -- Bridging LLMs and Causal World Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown great promise in planning and reasoning applications. These tasks demand robust systems, which arguably require a causal understanding of the environment. While LLMs can a…
Causal InferenceCommon Sense ReasoningRepresentation Learning