Binary Rewards and Reinforcement Learning: Fundamental Challenges

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the fundamental challenges of using binary rewards in reinforcement learning for language models, revealing issues with diversity collapse and proposing divergence-based solutions.

Contribution

It provides a structural account of the degeneracy caused by binary rewards and suggests alternative divergence methods to improve coverage.

Findings

Binary rewards create an infinite set of optimal distributions.

KL-control selects the filtered model conditioned on validity.

Alternative divergences can avoid coverage collapse.

Abstract

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard approach for improving reasoning in language models, yet models trained with RLVR often suffer from diversity collapse: while single-sample accuracy improves, multi-sample coverage degrades, sometimes falling below the base model. We provide a structural account of this phenomenon grounded in the properties of binary rewards. Binary rewards create a fundamental degeneracy for policy gradient methods: the set of distributions maximizing expected reward is infinite, with no distinguished element. KL-control resolves this degeneracy by selecting, in the limit $\beta\to 0$, the filtered model $p_*:=a(\cdot\mid\mathcal{Y}_1)$ -- the base model conditioned on validity -- which is the unique fully valid distribution closest to the base model in KL divergence. This selection operates through a nontrivial asymmetry: the tilted distribution $p_{[\beta]}\propto a(y)\,e^{v(y)/\beta}$ converges to $p_*$ in forward KL as $\beta\to 0$, yet $p_*$ cannot serve as a direct optimization target because $\mathrm{KL}(q\,\|\,p_*)$ is infinite for any full-support policy $q$. We develop explicit formulas relating the hyperparameter $\beta$ to the more interpretable target validity rate $\mu$. Under model misspecification -- the typical practical regime -- the pressure to decrease $\beta$ drives the optimizer toward highly concentrated distributions over a small number of valid outputs, collapsing toward ever fewer as $\beta$ decreases, rather than toward the filtered model. We illustrate this mechanism on a toy autoregressive experiment and discuss how alternative divergences that target $p_*$ directly -- as pursued empirically by \citet{kruszewski_whatever_2026} -- avoid this failure mode by rewarding coverage of $p_*$'s support rather than concentration on high-validity outputs.