TraPO: A Semi-Supervised Reinforcement Learning Framework for Boosting LLM Reasoning

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission19979 Authors

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards, Semi-supervised Learning, Large Language Model

Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has proven effective in training large reasoning models (LRMs) by leveraging answer-verifiable signals to guide policy optimization, which, however, suffers from high annotation costs. To alleviate this problem, recent work has explored unsupervised RLVR methods that derive rewards solely from the model’s internal consistency, such as through entropy and majority voting. While seemingly promising, these methods often suffer from model collapse in the later stages of training, which may arise from the reinforcement of incorrect reasoning patterns in the absence of external supervision. In this work, we investigate a novel semi-supervised RLVR paradigm that utilizes a small labeled set to **guide** RLVR training on unlabeled samples. Our key insight is that supervised rewards are essential for stabilizing consistency-based training on unlabeled samples, ensuring that only reasoning patterns verified on labeled instances are incorporated into RL training. Technically, we propose an effective policy optimization algorithm TraPO that filters out reliable unlabeled samples by matching their learning trajectory similarity to labeled ones. Building on this, TraPO achieves remarkable data efficiency and strong generalization on nine advanced benchmarks. With only 1K labeled and 3K unlabeled samples, TraPO reaches 42.6% average accuracy, surpassing the best unsupervised method trained on 45K unlabeled samples (38.3%). Notably, when using 4K labeled and 12K unlabeled samples, TraPO even **outperforms the fully supervised model** trained on the full 45K labeled samples on all benchmarks, while using only **10%** of the labeled data.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

Submission Number: 19979