How Difficulty-Aware Staged Reinforcement Learning Enhances LLMs' Reasoning Capabilities: A Preliminary Experimental Study

Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with efficiency and scalability remains a fundamental challenge in artificial intelligence research. This paper presents a rigorous experimental investigation into how difficulty-aware staged reinforcement learning (RL) strategies can substantially improve LLM reasoning performance. Through systematic analysis, we demonstrate that strategically selecting training data according to well-defined difficulty levels markedly enhances RL optimization. Moreover, we introduce a staged training methodology, progressively exposing models to increasingly challenging tasks, further amplifying reasoning capabilities. Our findings reveal significant cross-domain benefits when simultaneously training models on mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks. Notably, our proposed approach enables a 1.5B parameter model to achieve an accuracy of 42.3\% on the AIME-2024 benchmark, 89.5\% on the MATH-500 benchmark. These results underscore the efficacy of our method in advancing the reasoning proficiency of LLMs. We will open-source our datasets on GitHub and Hugging Face.

@article{ji2025_2504.00829,
  title={ How Difficulty-Aware Staged Reinforcement Learning Enhances LLMs' Reasoning Capabilities: A Preliminary Experimental Study },
  author={ Yunjie Ji and Sitong Zhao and Xiaoyu Tian and Haotian Wang and Shuaiting Chen and Yiping Peng and Han Zhao and Xiangang Li },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.00829},
  year={ 2025 }
}