RL mostly sharpens easy tasks, but can find tail solutions on harder ones
Pavel_Izmailov · x · 2026-07-21
The authors examine what RL actually changes in the policy.
- On easy tasks, RL mostly sharpens an already-good policy.
- On harder tasks, RL can sometimes uncover a tail solution that had very low probability under the original policy.
- This suggests RL is not only refinement, but can also reveal rare promising behaviors.
Related event: New Research Proposes Joint Scaling Law for Pretraining and RL(18 posts)→
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