Learning to Reason as Action Abstractions with Scalable Mid-Training RL

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission20086 Authors

Keywords: reinforcement learning, large language model

Abstract: Large language models excel with reinforcement learning (RL), but fully unlocking this potential requires a mid-training stage. Intuitively, an effective mid-training stage should both learn a strong policy prior and enable fast learning through online interactions. We formalize this intuition by presenting the first theoretical result on how mid-training shapes post-training: it acquires strong policy priors by efficiently pruning the action space and accelerates RL convergence by shortening the effective planning horizon. Moreover, we prove that temporal abstractions simultaneously compress the size of the action set and reduce the decision horizon, thereby improving regret minimization after training. Building on these insights, we introduce Reasoning as Action Abstractions (RA3), a scalable mid-training algorithm. Specifically, we derive a temporal variational bound and optimize it by iteratively discovering temporally-consistent latent structures via RL, then fine-tuning on the bootstrapped data. Experiments on code generation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Across multiple base models, RA3 improves the average performance on HumanEval and MBPP by 8 and 4 points over the base model and the next-token prediction baseline. Furthermore, RA3 achieves faster convergence and higher asymptotic performance in RLVR on HumanEval+, MBPP+, LiveCodeBench, and Codeforces.

Primary Area: reinforcement learning

Submission Number: 20086