Study finds RL for reasoning changes only a few tokens, and you can copy the effect
A new analysis of reinforcement learning for LLM reasoning suggests the field's biggest gains come from a surprisingly small change. RL is not rewriting how models think. It is nudging a tiny slice of the output. What the researchers measured Across several model families and common methods like GRPO and PPO, reinforcement learning reranks only 1.0 to 4.1 percent of tokens. The token it promotes is almost always already one of the base model's top five choices. Training, in other words, pushe
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