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HFEPX · Eval paper review

REA-RL: Reflection-Aware Online Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Reasoning

Hexuan Deng, Wenxiang Jiao, Xuebo Liu, Jun Rao +1 more

Published

May 26, 2025

Citations

0

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

40/100 (Low)

Extraction confidence

45% (Low)

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Rater population

Not reported

Signals refreshed

Feb 27, 2026

Should you rely on this paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

Background context only.

What to verify

Read the full paper before copying any benchmark, metric, or protocol choices.

Main weakness

The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.

Human feedback signal
Detected
From extracted signals
Evaluation signal
Weak or implicit
Validate from full paper
Usefulness for eval research
40/100
Adjacent candidate

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Abstract

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate strong performance in complex tasks but often face the challenge of overthinking, leading to substantially high inference costs. Existing approaches synthesize shorter reasoning responses for LRMs to learn, but are inefficient for online usage due to the time-consuming data generation and filtering processes. Meanwhile, online reinforcement learning mainly adopts a length reward to encourage short reasoning responses, but it tends to lose reflection ability and harm performance. To address these issues, we propose REA-RL, which introduces a small reflection model for efficient scaling in online training, offering both parallel sampling and sequential revision. Besides, a reflection reward is designed to further prevent LRMs from favoring short yet non-reflective responses. Experiments show that both methods maintain or enhance performance while significantly improving inference efficiency. Their combination achieves a good balance between performance and efficiency, reducing inference costs by 36% without compromising performance. Further analysis demonstrates that our methods are effective by maintaining reflection frequency for hard problems while appropriately reducing it for easier ones without losing reflection ability. Code is available at https://github.com/hexuandeng/REA-RL.

What we could verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

partial

Critique Edit

Directly usable for protocol triage.

"Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate strong performance in complex tasks but often face the challenge of overthinking, leading to substantially high inference costs."

Evaluation Modes

missing

None explicit

Validate eval design from full paper text.

"Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate strong performance in complex tasks but often face the challenge of overthinking, leading to substantially high inference costs."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate strong performance in complex tasks but often face the challenge of overthinking, leading to substantially high inference costs."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate strong performance in complex tasks but often face the challenge of overthinking, leading to substantially high inference costs."

Reported Metrics

missing

Not extracted

No metric anchors detected.

"Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate strong performance in complex tasks but often face the challenge of overthinking, leading to substantially high inference costs."

Benchmarks and datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported metrics

No metric terms were extracted from the available abstract.

Human feedback details
Uses human feedback
Yes
Feedback types
Critique Edit
Rater population
Not reported
Expertise required
Coding
Evaluation details
Evaluation modes
None
Agentic eval
None
Quality controls
Not reported
Evidence quality
Low
Use this page as
Background context only

Research brief

Metadata summary

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate strong performance in complex tasks but often face the challenge of overthinking, leading to substantially high inference costs.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key takeaways

  • Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate strong performance in complex tasks but often face the challenge of overthinking, leading to substantially high inference costs.
  • Existing approaches synthesize shorter reasoning responses for LRMs to learn, but are inefficient for online usage due to the time-consuming data generation and filtering processes.
  • Meanwhile, online reinforcement learning mainly adopts a length reward to encourage short reasoning responses, but it tends to lose reflection ability and harm performance.

Researcher actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Check the full text for explicit evaluation design choices (raters, protocol, and metrics).
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended queries

Contribution summary

  • To address these issues, we propose REA-RL, which introduces a small reflection model for efficient scaling in online training, offering both parallel sampling and sequential revision.
  • Their combination achieves a good balance between performance and efficiency, reducing inference costs by 36% without compromising performance.

Researcher checklist

  • Human feedback protocol is explicit

    Detected: Critique Edit

  • Evaluation mode is explicit

    No clear evaluation mode extracted.

  • Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Metric reporting is present

    No metric terms extracted.