# CLPO: Curriculum Learning meets Policy Optimization for LLM Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25004 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25004/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reinforcement learning for reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 30 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

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

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

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [OlympiadBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Promoting AGI with Olympiad-Level Bilingual Multimodal Scientific Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14008/) (2024)
- [Group Sequence Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18071/) (2025)
- [RAFT: Reward rAnked FineTuning for Generative Foundation Model Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06767/) (2023)
- [Beyond the 80/20 Rule: High-Entropy Minority Tokens Drive Effective Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01939/) (2025)
- [Process Reinforcement through Implicit Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01456/) (2025)
- [The Entropy Mechanism of Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22617/) (2025)
- [The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17493/) (2023)
- [Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards Implicitly Incentivizes Correct Reasoning in Base LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14245/) (2025)
- [Learning to Reason under Off-Policy Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14945/) (2025)
- [Reasoning with Exploration: An Entropy Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14758/) (2025)
- [R-Zero: Self-Evolving Reasoning LLM from Zero Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05004/) (2025)
- [TheoremQA: A Theorem-driven Question Answering dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12524/) (2023)
- [Efficient Reinforcement Finetuning via Adaptive Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05520/) (2025)
- [Critique-GRPO: Advancing LLM Reasoning with Natural Language and Numerical Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03106/) (2025)
- [Pass@K Policy Optimization: Solving Harder Reinforcement Learning Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15201/) (2025)
- [Sample More to Think Less: Group Filtered Policy Optimization for Concise Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09726/) (2025)
- [Critique Fine-Tuning: Learning to Critique is More Effective than Learning to Imitate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17703/) (2025)
- [Enhancing LLM Reasoning via Critique Models with Test-Time and Training-Time Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16579/) (2024)
- [Beyond Pass@1: Self-Play with Variational Problem Synthesis Sustains RLVR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14029/) (2025)
- [FastCuRL: Curriculum Reinforcement Learning with Stage-wise Context Scaling for Efficient Training R1-like Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17287/) (2025)
- [Train Long, Think Short: Curriculum Learning for Efficient Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08940/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Learning to Hint for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00698/) (2026)
- [Unveiling Implicit Advantage Symmetry: Why GRPO Struggles with Exploration and Difficulty Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05548/) (2026)
- [On Calibration of Large Language Models: From Response To Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13540/) (2026)
- [Off-Context GRPO: Learning to Reason on Hard Problems using Privileged Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19313/) (2026)
- [Overconfident Errors Need Stronger Correction: Asymmetric Confidence Penalties for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21420/) (2026)
- [BAPO: Boundary-Aware Policy Optimization for Reliable Agentic Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11037/) (2026)
- [Supervised Fine-Tuning versus Reinforcement Learning: A Study of Post-Training Methods for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13985/) (2026)
- [ZipRL: Adaptive Multi-Turn Context Compression with Hindsight Response Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28069/) (2026)
- [Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization: Teacher in Prompts, Not Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18216/) (2026)
- [ETR: Outcome-Guided Elastic Trust Regions for Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03723/) (2026)
- [Answer First, Reason Later: Aligning Search Relevance via Mode-Balanced Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10006/) (2026)
- [Climbing the Hill: Prompt Injection Red-Teaming Against Frontier Models with Curriculum Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33628/) (2026)
- [Frontier Learning: Training LLM Reasoners at the Edge of Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35426/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Online reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become an effective paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models, but most methods still optimize reasoning trajectories over the static problem set, wasting rollout budget on solved or overly difficult problems. We propose CLPO (Curriculum Learning meets Policy Optimization), a self-evolving curriculum framework that uses on-policy rollout accuracy to identify solved, medium-difficulty, and hard problems, then restructures selected tasks according to the model's current capability. Hard problems are simplified to become learnable, while medium-difficulty problems are diversified to provide useful training variation. This allows the learning curriculum to co-evolve with the policy rather than remaining fixed as the model's capability boundary shifts. Rather than treating these rewrites as static data augmentation, CLPO optimizes restructuring trajectories with credit assigned by the downstream accuracy gain of the rewritten problem, requiring no additional human annotations beyond the original verifiable answers. Experiments across mathematical reasoning and out-of-domain general reasoning benchmarks show that CLPO substantially outperforms GRPO and DAPO on Qwen3-8B by 10.21 and 7.75 average points, respectively. Ablation studies on math and code domains further show that both the restructuring mode and the rewriting loss contribute to the final gains, demonstrating that CLPO provides a scalable and robust pathway for eliciting stronger reasoning capabilities through a self-evolving curriculum.