How Far Can Unsupervised RLVR Scale LLM Training?

Unsupervised reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (URLVR) offers a pathway to scale LLM training beyond the supervision bottleneck by deriving rewards without ground truth labels. Recent works leverage model intrinsic signals, showing promising early gains, yet their potential and limitations remain unclear. In this work, we revisit URLVR and provide a comprehensive analysis spanning taxonomy, theory and extensive experiments. We first classify URLVR methods into intrinsic versus external based on reward sources, then establish a unified theoretical framework revealing that all intrinsic methods converge toward sharpening the model's initial distribution This sharpening mechanism succeeds when initial confidence aligns with correctness but fails catastrophically when misaligned. Through systematic experiments, we show intrinsic rewards consistently follow a rise-then-fall pattern across methods, with collapse timing determined by model prior rather than engineering choices. Despite these scaling limits, we find intrinsic rewards remain valuable in test-time training on small datasets, and propose Model Collapse Step to measure model prior, serving as a practical indicator for RL trainability. Finally, we explore external reward methods that ground verification in computational asymmetries, showing preliminary evidence they may escape the confidence-correctness ceiling. Our findings chart boundaries for intrinsic URLVR while motivating paths toward scalable alternatives.

Can Pruning Improve Reasoning? Revisiting Long-CoT Compression with Capability in Mind for Better Reasoning

Long chain-of-thought (Long-CoT) reasoning improves accuracy in LLMs, yet its verbose, self-reflective style often hinders effective distillation into small language models (SLMs). We revisit Long-CoT compression through the lens of capability alignment and ask: Can pruning improve reasoning? We propose Prune-on-Logic, a structure-aware framework that transforms Long-CoT into logic graphs and selectively prunes low-utility reasoning steps under self-verification constraints. Through systematic analysis across three pruning strategies -- targeting entire chains, core reasoning, and verification -- we find that pruning verification steps yields consistent accuracy gains while reducing inference cost, outperforming token-level baselines and uncompressed fine-tuning. In contrast, pruning reasoning or all-chain steps degrades performance, revealing that small models benefit not from shorter CoTs, but from semantically leaner ones. Our findings highlight pruning as a structural optimization strategy for aligning CoT reasoning with SLM capacity.