# Transferability for General Reasoning: An Automated Curriculum for Multi-Domain RLVR

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25178 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25178/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12022/) (2023)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19256/) (2024)
- [LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07974/) (2024)
- [Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04730/) (2017)
- [Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06782/) (2020)
- [An Overview of Multi-Task Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05098/) (2017)
- [PyTorch FSDP: Experiences on Scaling Fully Sharded Data Parallel](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11277/) (2023)
- [Estimating Training Data Influence by Tracing Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08484/) (2020)
- [FinQA: A Dataset of Numerical Reasoning over Financial Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00122/) (2021)
- [LESS: Selecting Influential Data for Targeted Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04333/) (2024)
- [Conflict-Averse Gradient Descent for Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14048/) (2021)
- [DoReMi: Optimizing Data Mixtures Speeds Up Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10429/) (2023)
- [Language Models Are Greedy Reasoners: A Systematic Formal Analysis of Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01240/) (2022)
- [CRUXEval: A Benchmark for Code Reasoning, Understanding and Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03065/) (2024)
- [TRAK: Attributing Model Behavior at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14186/) (2023)
- [Teacher-Student Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00183/) (2017)
- [ZebraLogic: On the Scaling Limits of LLMs for Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01100/) (2025)
- [ARC-AGI-2: A New Challenge for Frontier AI Reasoning Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11831/) (2025)
- [General-Reasoner: Advancing LLM Reasoning Across All Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14652/) (2025)
- [MultiHiertt: Numerical Reasoning over Multi Hierarchical Tabular and Textual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01347/) (2022)
- [HiTab: A Hierarchical Table Dataset for Question Answering and Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06712/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [One Step, One Lead: Mitigating Higher-Order Interference in Multi-Domain Reinforcement Learning via Cross-Step Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06469/) (2026)
- [HarnessBandit: Joint Learnability-Transferability Scheduling for Multi-Harness Agentic Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13739/) (2026)
- [Toward Skill-Native LLMs: Skill Entropy for Benchmarking and Training Long-Horizon Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05139/) (2026)
- [RISED: RubrIcs for agentic multi-environment Selection and sElf-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00979/) (2026)
- [LLM Agents for Automated Post-Training via Structured Recipe Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18572/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been extended from single-domain training to multi-domain reasoning suites spanning mathematics, programming, and science. However, the training curriculum (how often each domain is sampled) is typically fixed or hand-tuned, even though reasoning skills transfer unevenly across domains. Existing learnability-based curricula adapt to where the policy is currently improving, but are blind to whether a gradient step on the selected domain benefits the remaining domains. In this paper, we propose Transfer-Aware Curriculum (TAC), a bandit-style online curriculum that prioritizes domains whose updates broadly benefit the rest of the training suite. TAC repurposes signals already produced by RL training: per-domain advantages capture local learnability, and projected gradients, taken from the GRPO step being computed, estimate cross-domain transferability via gradient-geometry alignment, at negligible cost (<1% wall-clock overhead). Across a six-domain reasoning suite, TAC achieves the best macro-averaged accuracy on both Qwen3-1.7B and Llama3.2-3B, outperforming proportional random sampling, a hand-designed schedule, and a learnability-only bandit, and improving over the last of these by up to 2.8 points (10% relative). Ablations show performance degrades sharply when the transferability term is removed, and TAC remains robust on imbalanced training mixtures where learnability-only curricula over-commit to dominant domains. Our findings establish cross-domain transferability as a key signal for curriculum design in multi-domain RLVR.
