No Prompt Left Behind: Exploiting Zero-Variance Prompts in LLM Reinforcement Learning via Entropy-Guided Advantage Shaping

🤗 Upvotes: 27 | cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG

Authors:
Thanh-Long V. Le, Myeongho Jeon, Kim Vu, Viet Lai, Eunho Yang

Title:
No Prompt Left Behind: Exploiting Zero-Variance Prompts in LLM Reinforcement Learning via Entropy-Guided Advantage Shaping

Arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21880v1

Abstract:
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a powerful framework for improving the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, current methods such as GRPO rely only on problems where the model responses to the same input differ in correctness, while ignoring those where all responses receive the same reward - so-called zero-variance prompts. In this work, we argue that such prompts are not useless but can, in fact, provide meaningful feedback for policy optimization. To this end, we introduce RL with Zero-Variance Prompts (RL-ZVP), a novel algorithm that extract learning signals from zero-variance prompts. RL-ZVP directly rewards correctness and penalizes errors even without contrasting responses, modulating feedback with token-level characteristics to preserve informative, nuanced signals. Across six math reasoning benchmarks, RL-ZVP achieves significant improvements of up to 8.61 points in accuracy and 7.77 points in pass rate over GRPO, while consistently outperforming other baselines that filter out zero-variance prompts. These results highlight the untapped potential of learning from zero-variance prompts in RLVR.