# RuleReasoner: Reinforced Rule-based Reasoning via Domain-aware Dynamic Sampling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08672 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08672/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reinforcement learning for reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 74 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reinforcement learning for reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reinforcement-learning-for-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 74)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12022/) (2023)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19256/) (2024)
- [Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09261/) (2022)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20783/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-Math Technical Report: Toward Mathematical Expert Model via Self-Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12122/) (2024)
- [Large Language Monkeys: Scaling Inference Compute with Repeated Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21787/) (2024)
- [SFT Memorizes, RL Generalizes: A Comparative Study of Foundation Model Post-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17161/) (2025)
- [PyTorch FSDP: Experiences on Scaling Fully Sharded Data Parallel](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11277/) (2023)
- [Open-Reasoner-Zero: An Open Source Approach to Scaling Up Reinforcement Learning on the Base Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24290/) (2025)
- [DoReMi: Optimizing Data Mixtures Speeds Up Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10429/) (2023)
- [Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03335/) (2025)
- [Language Models Are Greedy Reasoners: A Systematic Formal Analysis of Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01240/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13178/) (2024)
- [Demystifying Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03373/) (2025)
- [ProofWriter: Generating Implications, Proofs, and Abductive Statements over Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13048/) (2020)
- [rStar-Math: Small LLMs Can Master Math Reasoning with Self-Evolved Deep Thinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04519/) (2025)
- [MM-Eureka: Exploring the Frontiers of Multimodal Reasoning with Rule-based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07365/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Understanding and Leveraging the Expert Specialization of Context Faithfulness in Mixture-of-Experts LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19594/) (2025)
- [Native Parallel Reasoner: Reasoning in Parallelism via Self-Distilled Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07461/) (2025)
- [LogicReward: Incentivizing LLM Reasoning via Step-Wise Logical Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18196/) (2025)
- [LM-Lexicon: Improving Definition Modeling via Harmonizing Semantic Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14060/) (2026)
- [SUPERNOVA: Eliciting General Reasoning in LLMs with Reinforcement Learning on Natural Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08477/) (2026)
- [RISED: RubrIcs for agentic multi-environment Selection and sElf-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00979/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Rule-based reasoning is acknowledged as one of the fundamental problems of reasoning. While recent studies show that large reasoning models (LRMs) have remarkable reasoning capabilities enhanced by reinforcement learning (RL), real applications still face severe challenges due to variations in rule formats, types, and complexity. To mitigate this issue, we introduce RuleReasoner, an effective method for rule-based reasoning via a wide collection of curated tasks and a novel domain-aware dynamic sampling approach in RL. Specifically, RuleReasoner resamples each training batch by updating the domain weights based on historical rewards. This facilitates domain balance and active learning schedules for RL, obviating static mix-training engineered by human. Evaluations on in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks reveal that RuleReasoner outperforms frontier LRMs by a significant margin (Delta4.1% on eight ID tasks and Delta10.4% on three OOD tasks over OpenAI-o1). Notably, our approach also exhibits higher computational efficiency compared to prior methods.