MaPP: A Unified Marginalized Posterior-Predictive Framework for Data-Efficient RLVR
Yangyang Ren, Haodong Zhu, Sheng Xu, Yanjing Li, Nikolai Yu. Zolotykh, Wentao Zhang, Baochang Zhang
Abstract
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models but incurs substantial costs from rollouts and policy updates. Online prompt selection improves efficiency by using per-prompt Bayesian posteriors to predict difficulty and prioritize informative prompts. However, existing methods overlook how reliably learning signals are extracted from sampled responses. In GRPO, a response's advantage depends on both its own outcome and the randomly sampled outcomes of its peers through group normalization. Our theoretical and experimental analyses show that uncertainty in group composition introduces composition noise, a non-vanishing variance component that imposes an irreducible lower bound on gradient estimation error and impairs downstream prompt selection. We propose MaPP (Marginalized Posterior-Predictive), a unified framework for data-efficient RLVR that denoises response-level advantage estimation and improves prompt selection using a shared Beta posterior. For each response, MaPP replaces the standard group-relative advantage with a composition-invariant intrinsic advantage through closed-form Beta-Binomial marginalization. The resulting posterior-predictive estimator has an error that provably diminishes as the posterior concentrates. Using the same posterior, MaPP derives an uncertainty-aware prompt selection score to improve data efficiency without additional rollout cost. Experiments on mathematics, planning, and visual geometry across five model backbones show that MaPP consistently outperforms GRPO and strong selection baselines, achieving up to +2.45 average accuracy improvement over the strongest baseline under the same rollout budget and setting a new state of the art.