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arXiv · 2605.28631

Single-Rollout Hidden-State Dynamics for Training-Free RLVR Data Selection

Jianghao Wu·Jianfei Cai·Weiqiang Wang·Jin Ye·Daniel F. Schmidt·Yasmeen George
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Abstract

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can yield large reasoning gains from very few training instances, yet its strong sensitivity to which instances are used makes data selection a central bottleneck. Most existing selection pipelines rely on training-time optimization signals and/or require access to verifiable rewards or ground-truth answers over large candidate pools, which is costly and often infeasible in specialized domains. We study RLVR data selection in a setting where selection must be performed before any RL training and without labels or reward evaluation on the full pool. We propose SHIFT, a one-shot, training-free selector based solely on inference-time hidden-state dynamics. For each candidate instance, SHIFT runs a single deterministic reasoning rollout and computes a reasoning-induced representation shift (RIRS) as the start-to-end hidden-state delta. SHIFT uses the RIRS magnitude as a lightweight proxy for instance utility and enforces coverage via a quality-weighted farthest-first CoreSet procedure in an RIRS-augmented feature space, producing compact subsets that scale to large unlabeled pools. Across mathematical reasoning and medical QA benchmarks under ultra-low budgets, SHIFT consistently outperforms training-free diversity and difficulty/uncertainty baselines, improving both in-domain accuracy and transfer to harder evaluation settings. Ablations show that RIRS-based coverage and quality-weighting contribute complementary gains, and analyses indicate that RIRS is not explained by simple input/output length statistics. Code is available at github.com/JianghaoWu/SHIFT.

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Jianghao Wu, Jianfei Cai, Weiqiang Wang, Jin Ye, Daniel F. Schmidt, Yasmeen George. 2026-05-27. Single-Rollout Hidden-State Dynamics for Training-Free RLVR Data Selection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28631

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