mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Can LLMs Learn to Reason Robustly under Noisy Supervision?

arXiv 2604.03993 ↗First posted 5 Apr 2026cs.LG cs.AIcited by 2

On the map: LLM reasoning → Reinforcement learning for reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) effectively trains reasoning models that rely on abundant perfect labels, but its vulnerability to unavoidable noisy labels due to expert scarcity remains critically underexplored. In this work, we take the first step toward a systematic analysis of noisy label mechanisms in RLVR. In contrast to supervised classification, most RLVR algorithms incorporate a rollout-based condition: a label's influence on training is contingent on whether the current policy can generate rollouts that realize it, a property that naturally extends to noisy labels. Based on this observation, we distinguish two types of noise: inactive noisy labels, which reduce data efficiency, and active noisy labels, which are reinforced and risk skewing the model toward incorrect distributions. From experiments on training with noisy samples, we identify an Early Correctness Coherence phenomenon: although noisy samples begin to lag behind in later stages, accuracy on both clean and noisy samples increases similarly in early training. Motivated by this dynamic, we propose Online Label Refinement (OLR), which progressively corrects potentially noisy labels with majority-voted answers when two conditions hold: a positive slope in the majority answer's rollout pass rate and stable historical consistency across updates, enabling gradual self-correction as the policy improves. We evaluate OLR on six in-distribution mathematical reasoning benchmarks (AIME24/25, AMC, MATH-500, Minerva, and Olympiad) and three out-of-distribution tasks (ARC-c, GPQA-diamond, and MMLU-pro). Across noise ratios from 0.1 to 0.9, OLR consistently improves robustness under both inactive and active noisy-label settings, achieving average gains of 3.6% to 3.9% on in-distribution benchmarks and 3.3% to 4.6% on out-of-distribution evaluations.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning for reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 73 of its 93 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Apr 2026.

Builds on

73 of 93 references.

Closest ancestors · 16

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025ExGRPO: Learning to Reason from Experience2 Oct
  2. 2025Confidence Is All You Need: Few-Shot RL Fine-Tuning of Language Models5 Jun
  3. 2025Learning to Reason without External Rewards26 May
  4. 2025VerifyBench: Benchmarking Reference-based Reward Systems for Large Language Models21 May
  5. 2025The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Entropy Minimization in LLM Reasoning21 May
  6. 2025TTRL: Test-Time Reinforcement Learning22 Apr
  7. 2025Learning to Reason under Off-Policy Guidance21 Apr
  8. 2025Right Question is Already Half the Answer: Fully Unsupervised LLM Reasoning Incentivization8 Apr
  9. 2025Open-Reasoner-Zero: An Open Source Approach to Scaling Up Reinforcement Learning on the Base Model31 Mar
  10. 2025Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspective26 Mar
  11. 2025DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale18 Mar
  12. 2025Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards: GRPO's Effective Loss, Dynamics, and Success Amplification9 Mar
4 more
  1. 2025LIMR: Less is More for RL Scaling17 Feb
  2. 2025Self-Consistency of the Internal Reward Models Improves Self-Rewarding Language Models13 Feb
  3. 2025Kimi k1.5: Scaling Reinforcement Learning with LLMs22 Jan
  4. 2024CREAM: Consistency Regularized Self-Rewarding Language Models16 Oct

Other references · 57

  1. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,712
  2. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,192
  3. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
  4. 2014Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examplescited by 7,287
  5. 2021Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Datasetcited by 5,203
  6. 2017mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimizationcited by 5,155
  7. 2018Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challengecited by 4,710
  8. 2017Deep reinforcement learning from human preferencescited by 3,846
  9. 2023GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmarkcited by 2,748
  10. 2024MMLU-Pro: A More Robust and Challenging Multi-Task Language Understanding Benchmarkcited by 1,758
  11. 2019MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learningcited by 1,390
  12. 2022Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Modelscited by 1,359
38 more
  1. 2024OlympiadBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Promoting AGI with Olympiad-Level Bilingual Multimodal Scientific Problemscited by 1,099
  2. 2018Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labelscited by 1,053
  3. 2025Group Sequence Policy Optimizationcited by 788
  4. 2020DivideMix: Learning with Noisy Labels as Semi-supervised Learningcited by 691
  5. 2016Making Deep Neural Networks Robust to Label Noise: a Loss Correction Approachcited by 663
  6. 2024Self-Rewarding Language Modelscited by 654
  7. 2017MentorNet: Learning Data-Driven Curriculum for Very Deep Neural Networks on Corrupted Labelscited by 652
  8. 2017Regularizing Neural Networks by Penalizing Confident Output Distributionscited by 461
  9. 2019How does Disagreement Help Generalization against Label Corruption?cited by 390
  10. 2019Using Pre-Training Can Improve Model Robustness and Uncertaintycited by 373
  11. 2020Combating noisy labels by agreement: A joint training method with co-regularizationcited by 289
  12. 2017Decoupling "when to update" from "how to update"cited by 230
  13. 2018Using Trusted Data to Train Deep Networks on Labels Corrupted by Severe Noisecited by 216
  14. 2019Understanding and Utilizing Deep Neural Networks Trained with Noisy Labelscited by 209
  15. 2020Does label smoothing mitigate label noise?cited by 204
  16. 2024Meta-Rewarding Language Models: Self-Improving Alignment with LLM-as-a-Meta-Judgecited by 202
  17. 2019SELF: Learning to Filter Noisy Labels with Self-Ensemblingcited by 164
  18. 2023SoftMatch: Addressing the Quantity-Quality Trade-off in Semi-supervised Learningcited by 133
  19. 2019Learning From Noisy Labels By Regularized Estimation Of Annotator Confusioncited by 126
  20. 2021Understanding and Improving Early Stopping for Learning with Noisy Labelscited by 112
  21. 2022Selective-Supervised Contrastive Learning with Noisy Labelscited by 112
  22. 2018Iterative Learning with Open-set Noisy Labelscited by 108
  23. 2021Learning with Feature-Dependent Label Noise: A Progressive Approachcited by 102
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  25. 2020Delving Deep into Label Smoothingcited by 94
  26. 2018Masking: A New Perspective of Noisy Supervisioncited by 93
  27. 2020Multi-Objective Interpolation Training for Robustness to Label Noisecited by 86
  28. 2021FINE Samples for Learning with Noisy Labelscited by 82
  29. 2021Jo-SRC: A Contrastive Approach for Combating Noisy Labelscited by 80
  30. 2022UNICON: Combating Label Noise Through Uniform Selection and Contrastive Learningcited by 77
  31. 2020A Topological Filter for Learning with Label Noisecited by 76
  32. 2019Robust Inference via Generative Classifiers for Handling Noisy Labelscited by 67
  33. 2025Self-rewarding correction for mathematical reasoningcited by 67
  34. 2021Open-set Label Noise Can Improve Robustness Against Inherent Label Noisecited by 58
  35. 2021NGC: A Unified Framework for Learning with Open-World Noisy Datacited by 58
  36. 2018Deep Bilevel Learningcited by 48
  37. 2017Deep Learning from Noisy Image Labels with Quality Embeddingcited by 46
  38. 2021Correlated Input-Dependent Label Noise in Large-Scale Image Classificationcited by 37

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

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  1. 2026When Self-Belief Misleads: Active Label Acquisition for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards
  2. 2026Noisy Data is Destructive to Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards
  3. 2026An Imperfect Verifier is Good Enough: Learning with Noisy Rewards
  4. 2026Rate or Fate? RLV^varepsilonR: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Noisy Rewards
  5. 2025TraPO: A Semi-Supervised Reinforcement Learning Framework for Boosting LLM Reasoning
  6. 2026Rewards as Labels: Revisiting RLVR from a Classification Perspective
  7. 2025The Climb Carves Wisdom Deeper Than the Summit: On the Noisy Rewards in Learning to Reason
  8. 2026JURY-RL: Votes Propose, Proofs Dispose for Label-Free RLVR