# Miner:Mining Intrinsic Mastery for Data-Efficient RL in Large Reasoning Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04731 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04731/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reinforcement learning for reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 30 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

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

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

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20783/) (2025)
- [Group Sequence Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18071/) (2025)
- [The Entropy Mechanism of Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22617/) (2025)
- [Cognitive Behaviors that Enable Self-Improving Reasoners, or, Four Habits of Highly Effective STaRs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01307/) (2025)
- [Reasoning with Exploration: An Entropy Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14758/) (2025)
- [REINFORCE++: Stabilizing Critic-Free Policy Optimization with Global Advantage Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03262/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Test-Time Scaling in Large Language Models: What, How, Where, and How Well?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24235/) (2025)
- [Beyond Binary Rewards: Training LMs to Reason About Their Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16806/) (2025)
- [Act Only When It Pays: Efficient Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning via Selective Rollouts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02177/) (2025)
- [OctoThinker: Mid-training Incentivizes Reinforcement Learning Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20512/) (2025)
- [MedReason: Eliciting Factual Medical Reasoning Steps in LLMs via Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00993/) (2025)
- [Not All Rollouts are Useful: Down-Sampling Rollouts in LLM Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13818/) (2025)
- [Does Thinking More always Help? Mirage of Test-Time Scaling in Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04210/) (2025)
- [Rewarding Doubt: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Calibrated Confidence Expression of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02623/) (2025)
- [BAPO: Stabilizing Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for LLMs via Balanced Policy Optimization with Adaptive Clipping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18927/) (2025)
- [VCRL: Variance-based Curriculum Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19803/) (2025)
- [GHPO: Adaptive Guidance for Stable and Efficient LLM Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10628/) (2025)
- [Unlocking Exploration in RLVR: Uncertainty-aware Advantage Shaping for Deeper Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10649/) (2025)
- [APRIL: Active Partial Rollouts in Reinforcement Learning to Tame Long-tail Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18521/) (2025)
- [Mid-Training of Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06826/) (2025)
- [Hybrid Reinforcement: When Reward Is Sparse, It's Better to Be Dense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07242/) (2025)
- [XRPO: Pushing the limits of GRPO with Targeted Exploration and Exploitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06672/) (2025)
- [Self-Guided Process Reward Optimization with Redefined Step-wise Advantage for Process Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01551/) (2025)
- [ICPO: Intrinsic Confidence-Driven Group Relative Preference Optimization for Efficient Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21005/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current critic-free RL methods for large reasoning models suffer from severe inefficiency when training on positive homogeneous prompts (where all rollouts are correct), resulting in waste of rollouts due to zero advantage estimates. We introduce a radically simple yet powerful solution to ulineMine ulineintrinsic mastulineery (Miner), that repurposes the policy's intrinsic uncertainty as a self-supervised reward signal, with no external supervision, auxiliary models, or additional inference cost. Our method pioneers two key innovations: (1) a token-level focal credit assignment mechanism that dynamically amplifies gradients on critical uncertain tokens while suppressing overconfident ones, and (2) adaptive advantage calibration to seamlessly integrate intrinsic and verifiable rewards. Evaluated across six reasoning benchmarks on Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B base models, Miner achieves state-of-the-art performance among the other four algorithms, yielding up to 4.58 absolute gains in Pass@1 and 6.66 gains in Pass@K compared to GRPO. Comparison with other methods targeted at exploration enhancement further discloses the superiority of the two newly proposed innovations. This demonstrates that latent uncertainty exploitation is both necessary and sufficient for efficient and scalable RL training of reasoning models. Code is available at https://github.com/pixas/Miner.