Better LLM Reasoning via Dual-Play

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Authors: Zhengxin Zhang, Chenyu Huang, A. Li, Claire Cardie
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), yet still rely heavily on external supervision (e.g., curated labels).Adversarial learning, particularly through self-play, offers a promising alternative that enables models to learn from themselves-thus reducing reliance on external supervision.Dual-play extends adversarial learning by assigning specialized roles to two models and training them against each other, fostering sustained competition and mutual evolution.Despite its promise, adapting dual-play training to LLMs remains limited.In this paper, we introduce PasoDoble, a novel LLM dual-play framework.PasoDoble adversarially trains two models initialized from the same base model: a Proposer, which generates challenging questions with ground-truth answers, and a Solver, which attempts to solve them.We enrich the Proposer with knowledge from a pre-training dataset to ensure the questions' quality and diversity.To avoid reward hacking, the Proposer is rewarded for producing only valid questions that push the Solver's limit, while the Solver is rewarded for solving them correctly, and both are updated jointly.Experimental results show that PasoDoble can improve the math reasoning performance of LLMs.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Topic Modeling Multimodal Machine Learning Applications Natural Language Processing Techniques

Publication details

Journal / source
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics
Pages
35111–35139
Publication date
1 January 2026