mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

PAC: Progress-Augmented Advantage Curriculum for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning of LLMs

arXiv 2608.30528 ↗First posted 31 Aug 2026cs.LGcited by 0

On the map: LLM reasoning → Reinforcement learning for reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Reinforcement learning (RL) is used to improve the reasoning abilities of LLMs, while training data span heterogeneous tasks. However, most RL post-training pipelines rely on fixed or manually designed task mixtures, even though task usefulness changes as training progresses. Online curriculum methods often define learnability by update magnitude, ignoring whether the update translates into reward gains, which can misallocate rollout budget toward tasks with large but ineffective updates. We propose PAC, a Progress-Augmented Advantage Curriculum for multi-task RL of LLMs that combines two task-level signals: advantage-derived learnability, which measures the magnitude of the policy update a task can induce, and recent reward gains, which show whether those updates have improved task performance. A Bayesian Thompson Sampling controller uses these signals to allocate rollouts across tasks during GRPO training. We evaluate PAC under two settings: a multi-level reasoning setting and a multi-domain reasoning setting. PAC improves sample efficiency and final performance: it reaches comparable validation scores with fewer rollout steps and achieves higher final averages than random sampling and advantage-based curriculum baselines in both settings. These results show that jointly tracking advantage signals and actual reward gains yields an effective online curriculum for LLM post-training.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning for reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 25 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2026.

Builds on

25 of 40 references.

Closest ancestors · 9

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Data-Efficient RLVR via Off-Policy Influence Guidance30 Oct
  2. 2025Can Prompt Difficulty be Online Predicted for Accelerating RL Finetuning of Reasoning Models?7 Jul
  3. 2025Curriculum Reinforcement Learning from Easy to Hard Tasks Improves LLM Reasoning7 Jun
  4. 2025Improving Data Efficiency for LLM Reinforcement Fine-tuning Through Difficulty-targeted Online Data Selection and Rollout Replay5 Jun
  5. 2025Self-Evolving Curriculum for LLM Reasoning20 May
  6. 2025DUMP: Automated Distribution-Level Curriculum Learning for RL-based LLM Post-training13 Apr
  7. 2025Online Difficulty Filtering for Reasoning Oriented Reinforcement Learning4 Apr
  8. 2025Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspective26 Mar
  9. 2023Let's Verify Step by Step31 May

Other references · 16

  1. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
  2. 2021Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Datasetcited by 5,203
  3. 2021Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learnerscited by 3,747
  4. 2022Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructionscited by 2,674
  5. 2023WizardLM: Empowering large pre-trained language models to follow complex instructionscited by 1,116
  6. 2022Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Taskscited by 858
  7. 2023The Flan Collection: Designing Data and Methods for Effective Instruction Tuningcited by 734
  8. 2023WizardMath: Empowering Mathematical Reasoning for Large Language Models via Reinforced Evol-Instructcited by 618
  9. 2020Curriculum Learning for Reinforcement Learning Domains: A Framework and Surveycited by 350
  10. 2017Automated Curriculum Learning for Neural Networkscited by 251
  11. 2017Distral: Robust Multitask Reinforcement Learningcited by 231
  12. 2017Teacher-Student Curriculum Learningcited by 197
4 more
  1. 2020Prioritized Level Replaycited by 190
  2. 2020Automatic Curriculum Learning For Deep RL: A Short Surveycited by 141
  3. 2025BOTS: A Unified Framework for Bayesian Online Task Selection in LLM Reinforcement Finetuningcited by 12
  4. 2026Complementary RL: Towards Efficient Experience-Driven Agent Learningcited by 5

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  1. 2026Neglected Free Lunch from Post-training: Progress Advantage for LLM Agents
  2. 2025Reinforcement Learning vs. Distillation: Understanding Accuracy and Capability in LLM Reasoning
  3. 2026Modularized Reinforcement Learning on LLMs: From MDP Creation to Exploration and Learning
  4. 2026Curriculum Reinforcement Learning Can Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model
  5. 2025Reasoning Curriculum: Bootstrapping Broad LLM Reasoning from Math
  6. 2026Beyond Solvability: Task Learnability as a Static Prior for LLM RL Post-Training
  7. 2026Transferability for General Reasoning: An Automated Curriculum for Multi-Domain RLVR
  8. 2026Generate, Filter, Control, Replay: A Comprehensive Survey of Rollout Strategies for LLM Reinforcement Learning