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arXiv · 2601.22975

Golden Goose: A Simple Trick to Synthesize Unlimited RLVR Tasks from Unverifiable Internet Text

Abstract

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a cornerstone for unlocking complex reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, scaling up RL is bottlenecked by limited existing verifiable data, where improvements increasingly saturate over prolonged training. To overcome this, we propose Golden Goose, a simple trick to synthesize unlimited RLVR tasks from unverifiable internet text by constructing a multiple-choice question-answering version of the fill-in-the-middle task. Given a source text, we prompt an LLM to identify and mask key reasoning steps, then generate a set of diverse, plausible distractors. This enables us to leverage reasoning-rich unverifiable corpora typically excluded from prior RLVR data construction (e.g., science textbooks) to synthesize GooseReason-0.7M, a large-scale RLVR dataset with over 0.7 million tasks spanning mathematics, programming, and general scientific domains. Empirically, GooseReason effectively revives models saturated on existing RLVR data, yielding robust, sustained gains under continuous RL and achieving new state-of-the-art results for 1.5B and 4B-Instruct models across 15 diverse benchmarks. Finally, we deploy Golden Goose in a real-world setting, synthesizing RLVR tasks from raw FineWeb scrapes for the cybersecurity domain, where no prior RLVR data exists. Training Qwen3-4B-Instruct on the resulting data GooseReason-Cyber sets a new state-of-the-art in cybersecurity, surpassing a 7B domain-specialized model with extensive domain-specific pre-training and post-training. This highlights the potential of automatically scaling up RLVR data by exploiting abundant, reasoning-rich, unverifiable internet text.

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Ximing Lu, David Acuna, Jaehun Jung, Jian Hu, Di Zhang, Shizhe Diao, Yunheng Zou, Shaokun Zhang, Brandon Cui, Mingjie Liu, Hyunwoo Kim, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Jan Kautz, Yi Dong, Yejin Choi. 2026-01-30. Golden Goose: A Simple Trick to Synthesize Unlimited RLVR Tasks from Unverifiable Internet Text. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22975

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