mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Dual Consensus: Escaping from Spurious Majority in Unsupervised RLVR via Two-Stage Vote Mechanism

arXiv 2603.16223 ↗First posted 17 Mar 2026cs.LGcited by 2

On the map: LLM reasoning → Reinforcement learning for reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Current label-free RLVR approaches for large language models (LLMs), such as TTRL and Self-reward, have demonstrated effectiveness in improving the performance of LLMs on complex reasoning tasks. However, these methods rely heavily on accurate pseudo-label estimation and converge on spurious yet popular answers, thereby trapping in a dominant mode and limiting further improvements. Building on this, we propose Dual Consensus Reinforcement Learning (DCRL), a novel self-supervised training method which is capable of generating more reliable learning signals through a two-stage consensus mechanism. The model initially acts as an anchor, producing dominant responses; then it serves as an explorer, generating diverse auxiliary signals via a temporary unlearning process. The final training target is derived from the harmonic mean of these two signal sets. Notably, the process operates entirely without external models or supervision. Across eight benchmarks and diverse domains, DCRL consistently improves Pass@1 over majority vote while yielding more stable training dynamics. These results demonstrate that DCRL establishes a scalable path toward stronger reasoning without labels.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning for reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 25 of its 33 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2026.

Builds on

25 of 33 references.

Closest ancestors · 8

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025SPINE: Token-Selective Test-Time Reinforcement Learning with Entropy-Band Regularization22 Nov
  2. 2025RESTRAIN: From Spurious Votes to Signals -- Self-Driven RL with Self-Penalization2 Oct
  3. 2025The Majority is not always right: RL training for solution aggregation8 Sep
  4. 2025The Surprising Effectiveness of Negative Reinforcement in LLM Reasoning2 Jun
  5. 2025Can Large Reasoning Models Self-Train?27 May
  6. 2025Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Data6 May
  7. 2025Right Question is Already Half the Answer: Fully Unsupervised LLM Reasoning Incentivization8 Apr
  8. 2023Math-Shepherd: Verify and Reinforce LLMs Step-by-step without Human Annotations14 Dec

Other references · 17

  1. 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 10,109
  2. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  3. 2021Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Datasetcited by 5,371
  4. 2023GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmarkcited by 2,879
  5. 2019Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferencescited by 2,150
  6. 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 2,057
  7. 2024MMLU-Pro: A More Robust and Challenging Multi-Task Language Understanding Benchmarkcited by 1,848
  8. 2022Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Modelscited by 1,392
  9. 2024OlympiadBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Promoting AGI with Olympiad-Level Bilingual Multimodal Scientific Problemscited by 1,136
  10. 2024Qwen2.5-Math Technical Report: Toward Mathematical Expert Model via Self-Improvementcited by 1,090
  11. 2022Large Language Models Can Self-Improvecited by 664
  12. 2019Test-Time Training with Self-Supervision for Generalization under Distribution Shiftscited by 59
5 more
  1. 2025Evolving Language Models without Labels: Majority Drives Selection, Novelty Promotes Variationcited by 45
  2. 2025ETTRL: Balancing Exploration and Exploitation in LLM Test-Time Reinforcement Learning Via Entropy Mechanismcited by 36
  3. 2025EEPO: Exploration-Enhanced Policy Optimization via Sample-Then-Forgetcited by 14
  4. 2025Self-Harmony: Learning to Harmonize Self-Supervision and Self-Play in Test-Time Reinforcement Learningcited by 10
  5. 2025AQA-TTRL: Self-Adaptation in Audio Question Answering with Test-Time Reinforcement Learningcited by 9

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Consensus as Privileged Context for Label-Free Self-Distillation
  2. 2026CoVerRL: Breaking the Consensus Trap in Label-Free Reasoning via Generator-Verifier Co-Evolution
  3. 2026Co-RL: Unsupervised Reasoning Emerges from Diverse Cohort in Multi-agent RL
  4. 2026What If Consensus Lies? Selective-Complementary Reinforcement Learning at Test Time
  5. 2025Enhancing the Outcome Reward-based RL Training of MLLMs with Self-Consistency Sampling
  6. 2025Self-Improvement of Language Models by Post-Training on Multi-Agent Debate
  7. 2025Co-rewarding: Stable Self-supervised RL for Eliciting Reasoning in Large Language Models
  8. 2026Reinforcement Learning from Meta-Evaluation: Aligning Language Models Without Ground-Truth Labels