Learning to Solve Hard Problems in RL for LLMs by Never Giving Up
Paper introduces Never Give Up adaptive sampling, fixing RL's 'Matthew Effect' where compute is wasted on easy problems and hard problems see little improvement.
Researchers identify a 'Matthew Effect' in reinforcement learning for LLMs, where RL yields large gains on easy problems but minimal improvement on hard ones because compute is misallocated. They propose Never Give Up (NGU), an adaptive sampling method that keeps generating samples for a problem until one is correct, using asynchronous RL to filter easy problems cheaply and concentrate compute on hard ones. NGU improves performance per compute on the Deepscaler math benchmark and iteratively solves the Manufactoria coding task where standard GRPO with per-test reward fails.