Implicit Actor Critic Coupling via a Supervised Learning Framework for RLVR

Abstract

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have empowered large language models (LLMs) to tackle challenging reasoning tasks such as mathematics and programming. Despite its promise, the RLVR paradigm poses significant challenges, as existing methods often suffer from sparse reward signals and unstable policy gradient updates, inherent to RL-based approaches. To address the challenges, we propose $\textbf{PACS}$, a novel RLVR framework that achieves im$\textbf{P}$licit $\textbf{A}$ctor $\textbf{C}$ritic coupling via a $\textbf{S}$upervised learning framework. By treating the outcome reward as a predictable label, we reformulate the RLVR problem into a supervised learning task over a score function parameterized by the policy model and optimized using cross-entropy loss. A detailed gradient analysis shows that this supervised formulation inherently recovers the classical policy gradient update while providing more stable and efficient training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PACS significantly outperforms strong open-source models and RLVR baselines, yielding substantial average gains of $\textbf{+8.26\%}$ (4B) and $\textbf{+9.57\%}$ (8B) over base models offering a promising avenue for LLMs post-training with verifiable rewards. Our code and data are available as open source at https://github.com/ritzz-ai/PACS.