CURE: Critique-Driven Unified Reinforcement Learning for Test-Time Self-Improvement
Guirong Chen Renmin University of China, Shuqi Ye, Wenkai Yang Renmin University of China, Shiqi Shen Wechat, Tencent, Guangyao Shen Tencent, Yankai Lin Renmin University of China
The evolution paradigm of Large Language Models (LLMs) is shifting from scaling training compute to scaling inference-time compute. While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a key engine for this transition, standard approaches often fail to equip models with the autonomous improvement capabilities required for test-time scaling. Existing critique-guided methods attempt to mitigate this by leveraging external feedback or ground-truth signals; however, these dependencies are unavailable at test time, fundamentally limiting the model’s capacity for continuous self-improvement. To bridge this gap, we propose CURE (Critique-driven Unified REinforcement Learning), a framework that jointly optimizes a single policy for standard solving, critiquing, and guided re-exploration. Uniquely, CURE facilitates re-exploration by generating strategic hints while discarding initial incorrect solutions to mitigate anchoring bias.Empirical results across diverse mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks demonstrate that CURE not only maintains competitive single-turn performance but, more importantly, unlocks effective inference-time scaling, enabling the model to significantly boost accuracy through iterative self-improvement.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表