Free Energy-Driven Reinforcement Learning with Adaptive Advantage Shaping for Unsupervised Reasoning in LLMs
Yiming Huang Harbin Institute of Technology, Zhenbo Shi, Xin-Cheng Wen, Jichuan Zeng Tencent Inc., Cuiyun Gao Harbin Institute of Technology, Peiyi Han Harbin Institute of Technology（ShenZhen）, Chuanyi Liu Harbin Institute of Technology
Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling self-improvement in large language models (LLMs). However, existing unsupervised RL-based methods often lack the capacity to adapt to the model’s evolving reasoning capabilities during training. Therefore, these methods can misdirect policy optimization in the absence of ground-truth supervision. To address this issue, we introduce FREIA, a novel RL-based algorithm built on two key innovations: (1) Free Energy-Driven Reward (FER) adapts rewards to balance consensus and exploration based on the Free Energy Principle. (2) Adaptive Advantage Shaping (AAS) adaptively adjusts learning signals based on the statistical characteristics of sampled rewards. Empirical evaluations on nine datasets across three reasoning tasks showcase that FREIA outperforms other unsupervised RL-based baselines. Notably, in mathematical reasoning tasks, FREIA surpasses other methods by an average of 0.5 to 3.5 points in Pass@1 using the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B model.
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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