On Reward Functions For Self-Improving General-Purpose Reasoning

Prompting a Large Language Model (LLM) to output Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning improves performance on complex problem-solving tasks. Further, several popular approaches exist to ``self-improve" the abilities of LLMs to use CoT on tasks where supervised (question, answer) datasets are available. However, an emerging line of work explores whether self-improvement is possible without supervised datasets, instead utilizing the same large, general-purpose text corpora as used during pre-training. This overcomes the data availability bottleneck present in current self-improvement methods, and opens the door towards \textit{compute-only scaling} of language model reasoning. We investigate a fundamental question in this line of work: What constitutes a suitable reward function for learning to reason during general language modelling?We empirically demonstrate how different functions affect what reasoning is learnt and where reasoning is rewarded. Using these insights, we introduce a novel reward function called Reasoning Advantage (RA) that facilitates self-improving CoT reasoning on free-form question-answering (QA) data, where answers are unstructured and difficult to verify. We explore the optimisation of RA on general-purpose text using offline RL. Our analysis indicates that future work should investigate more powerful optimisation algorithms, potentially moving towards more online algorithms that better explore the space of CoT generations.