Can LLMs Learn to Reason Robustly under Noisy Supervision?
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
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- 2025VerifyBench: Benchmarking Reference-based Reward Systems for Large Language Models21 May
- 2025The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Entropy Minimization in LLM Reasoning21 May
- 2025TTRL: Test-Time Reinforcement Learning22 Apr
- 2025Learning to Reason under Off-Policy Guidance21 Apr
- 2025Right Question is Already Half the Answer: Fully Unsupervised LLM Reasoning Incentivization8 Apr
- 2025Open-Reasoner-Zero: An Open Source Approach to Scaling Up Reinforcement Learning on the Base Model31 Mar
- 2025Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspective26 Mar
- 2025DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale18 Mar
- 2025Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards: GRPO's Effective Loss, Dynamics, and Success Amplification9 Mar
4 more
Other references · 57
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- 2021Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Datasetcited by 5,203
- 2017mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimizationcited by 5,155
- 2018Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challengecited by 4,710
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- 2023GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmarkcited by 2,748
- 2024MMLU-Pro: A More Robust and Challenging Multi-Task Language Understanding Benchmarkcited by 1,758
- 2019MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learningcited by 1,390
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- 2018Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labelscited by 1,053
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- 2020DivideMix: Learning with Noisy Labels as Semi-supervised Learningcited by 691
- 2016Making Deep Neural Networks Robust to Label Noise: a Loss Correction Approachcited by 663
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- 2019Learning From Noisy Labels By Regularized Estimation Of Annotator Confusioncited by 126
- 2021Understanding and Improving Early Stopping for Learning with Noisy Labelscited by 112
- 2022Selective-Supervised Contrastive Learning with Noisy Labelscited by 112
- 2018Iterative Learning with Open-set Noisy Labelscited by 108
- 2021Learning with Feature-Dependent Label Noise: A Progressive Approachcited by 102
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- 2020Delving Deep into Label Smoothingcited by 94
- 2018Masking: A New Perspective of Noisy Supervisioncited by 93
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- 2021Jo-SRC: A Contrastive Approach for Combating Noisy Labelscited by 80
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- 2020A Topological Filter for Learning with Label Noisecited by 76
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