[Submitted on 8 May 2026 (v1), last revised 28 Oct 2026 (this version, v2)]
Abstract:Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a central paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. Group-based policy optimization methods, such as GRPO, typically allocate a fixed number of rollouts to every prompt. This uniform allocation can be inefficient: it over-allocates compute to prompts whose sampled groups are already saturated while under-exploring prompts for which additional samples may reveal useful correct trajectories. To address this limitation, we introduce hit utility, the posterior probability that at least one rollout in a proposed additional allocation for a prompt will be correct. Building on this notion, we propose Hit-Utility Optimal Rollout Allocation (HORA), a learning-free rollout allocation policy that maximizes total posterior hit utility within each allocation batch. HORA adaptively reallocates rollout budgets while leaving the downstream reward evaluation and group-based advantage estimator unchanged. Across two training sets, four mathematical reasoning benchmarks, and three model families at multiple scales, HORA preserves comparable Pass@1 and improves Pass@K over compute-matched GRPO, and it outperforms related allocation baselines at large K. It is also drop-in compatible with other group-based estimators such as RLOO. Ablation studies indicate that the uniform prior used by HORA is competitive with five prompt-conditioned learned-prior alternatives.
Submission history
From: Tao Wang [view email]
[v1] Fri, 8 May 2026 01:42:25 UTC (1,392 KB)
[v2] Wed, 28 Oct 2026 19:47:53 UTC (320 KB)
