Balancing Reference Guidance and Free Generation in Trajectory Rollouts for Reasoning RL

Abstract

A verified reference solution provides a correct trajectory for training a reasoning model. Alternatively, a prefix of the reference can guide the model in generating a trajectory of its own. How much reference guidance should we provide? We study this question through prefix continuation, where the model continues from a reference prefix and keeps the resulting trajectory if it passes verification, falling back to the reference otherwise. Since both procedures produce correct trajectories, we compare their distributions with the ideal distribution, the model's own distribution conditioned on successful verification. For one continuation, we derive the KL divergence in closed form, which, up to a bounded term, decreases with the product of the probability of generating a different correct trajectory and the reference surprisal, the negative log probability of the reference suffix given the prefix. Since a longer prefix tends to raise the former but lowers the latter, continuation success alone does not determine the preferred amount of guidance. From this analysis, we learn a prefix selector shared across training questions from continuation outcomes, without estimating success probabilities or additional generation. The resulting Adaptive Reference Guidance (ARG) constructs correct trajectories within a fixed generation budget, and we apply it to all-failure groups in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments on Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B across five mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that ARG achieves the highest aggregate pass@12 among the evaluated methods with competitive average sampled accuracy.