# Skywork Open Reasoner 1 Technical Report

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22312 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22312/

## Key facts

- Cited by 165 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 15 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [High-Dimensional Continuous Control Using Generalized Advantage Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02438/) (2015)
- [OpenAI o1 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16720/) (2024)
- [Kimi k1.5: Scaling Reinforcement Learning with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12599/) (2025)
- [VAPO: Efficient and Reliable Reinforcement Learning for Advanced Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05118/) (2025)
- [TTRL: Test-Time Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16084/) (2025)
- [Light-R1: Curriculum SFT, DPO and RL for Long COT from Scratch and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10460/) (2025)
- [TACO: Topics in Algorithmic COde generation dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14852/) (2023)
- [LeetCodeDataset: A Temporal Dataset for Robust Evaluation and Efficient Training of Code LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14655/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 165)

- [OpenThoughts: Data Recipes for Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04178/) (2025)
- [Rethinking On-Policy Distillation of Large Language Models: Phenomenology, Mechanism, and Recipe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13016/) (2026)
- [Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards Implicitly Incentivizes Correct Reasoning in Base LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14245/) (2025)
- [Reasoning with Exploration: An Entropy Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14758/) (2025)
- [Skywork-Reward-V2: Scaling Preference Data Curation via Human-AI Synergy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01352/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08827/) (2025)
- [Agentic Reinforced Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19849/) (2025)
- [Pass@k Training for Adaptively Balancing Exploration and Exploitation of Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10751/) (2025)
- [Nemotron 3 Nano: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20848/) (2025)
- [Chain-of-Agents: End-to-End Agent Foundation Models via Multi-Agent Distillation and Agentic RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13167/) (2025)
- [AceReason-Nemotron 1.1: Advancing Math and Code Reasoning through SFT and RL Synergy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13284/) (2025)
- [AgentGym-RL: Training LLM Agents for Long-Horizon Decision Making through Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08755/) (2025)
- [Part I: Tricks or Traps? A Deep Dive into RL for LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08221/) (2025)
- [Intern-S1: A Scientific Multimodal Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15763/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Entropy Interventions in RLVR: An Entropy Change Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10150/) (2025)
- [SCOPE: Signal-Calibrated On-Policy Distillation Enhancement with Dual-Path Adaptive Weighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10688/) (2026)
- [Reinforcement Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08007/) (2025)
- [Stabilizing Knowledge, Promoting Reasoning: Dual-Token Constraints for RLVR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15778/) (2025)
- [Klear-Reasoner: Advancing Reasoning Capability via Gradient-Preserving Clipping Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07629/) (2025)
- [LLMs are Single-threaded Reasoners: Demystifying the Working Mechanism of Soft Thinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03440/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Process Reward Models: From Outcome Signals to Process Supervisions for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08049/) (2025)
- [Demystifying Reinforcement Learning in Agentic Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11701/) (2025)
- [EXAONE 4.0: Unified Large Language Models Integrating Non-reasoning and Reasoning Modes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11407/) (2025)
- [Trust Region On-Policy Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01249/) (2026)
- [Recognition through Reasoning: Reinforcing Image Geo-localization with Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14674/) (2025)
- [Single-stream Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13232/) (2025)
- [FIPO: Eliciting Deep Reasoning with Future-KL Influenced Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19835/) (2026)
- [CodeRL+: Improving Code Generation via Reinforcement with Execution Semantics Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18471/) (2025)
- [MedResearcher-R1: Expert-Level Medical Deep Researcher via A Knowledge-Informed Trajectory Synthesis Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14880/) (2025)
- [Differential Smoothing Mitigates Sharpening and Improves LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19942/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The success of DeepSeek-R1 underscores the significant role of reinforcement learning (RL) in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). In this work, we present Skywork-OR1, an effective and scalable RL implementation for long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) models. Building on the DeepSeek-R1-Distill model series, our RL approach achieves notable performance gains, increasing average accuracy across AIME24, AIME25, and LiveCodeBench from 57.8% to 72.8% (+15.0%) for the 32B model and from 43.6% to 57.5% (+13.9%) for the 7B model. Our Skywork-OR1-32B model surpasses both DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen3-32B on the AIME24 and AIME25 benchmarks, while achieving comparable results on LiveCodeBench. The Skywork-OR1-7B and Skywork-OR1-Math-7B models demonstrate competitive reasoning capabilities among models of similar size. We perform comprehensive ablation studies on the core components of our training pipeline to validate their effectiveness. Additionally, we thoroughly investigate the phenomenon of entropy collapse, identify key factors affecting entropy dynamics, and demonstrate that mitigating premature entropy collapse is critical for improved test performance. To support community research, we fully open-source our model weights, training code, and training datasets.
