# Experience Sharing in Mutual Reinforcement Learning for Heterogeneous Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07244 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07244/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 105 of its 126 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 105)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01290/) (2018)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [Learning to summarize from human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01325/) (2020)
- [Trust Region Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.05477/) (2015)
- [Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01783/) (2016)
- [BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10044/) (2019)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Learning Beyond What You Sample: Off-Policy-Aware Cross-Model Trajectory Exchange for RLVR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37868/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Mutual Reinforcement Learning, a framework for concurrent RL post-training in which heterogeneous LLM policies exchange typed experience while keeping separate parameters, objectives, and tokenizers. The framework combines a Shared Experience Exchange (SEE), Multi-Worker Resource Allocation (MWRA), and a Tokenizer Heterogeneity Layer (THL) that retokenizes text and aligns token-level traces across incompatible vocabularies. This substrate makes the experience-sharing design question operational across model families. We instantiate three controlled probes on top of GRPO: data-level rollout sharing via Peer Rollout Pooling (PRP), value-level advantage sharing via Cross-Policy GRPO Advantage Sharing (XGRPO), and outcome-level success transfer via Success-Gated Transfer (SGT). A contextual-bandit analysis characterizes their structural positions on a stability-support trade-off: PRP pays density-ratio variance and THL residual costs, XGRPO preserves on-policy actor support while changing scalar baselines, and SGT supplies a rescue-set score direction toward verified peer successes. In the evaluated regime, outcome-level sharing occupies the favorable point of this trade-off.
