Confidence Is All You Need: Few-Shot RL Fine-Tuning of Language Models

Li Pengyi, Matvey Skripkin, Alexander, Andrey Kuznetsov, Ivan Oseledets

Confidence Is All You Need: Few-Shot RL Fine-Tuning of Language Models: 135 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #1 of 28 papers on 2025-06-12. Day-by-day upvote history.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at reasoning, yet post-training remains critical for aligning their behavior with task goals. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods often depend on costly human annotations or external reward models. We propose Reinforcement Learning via Self-Confidence (RLSC), which uses the model's own confidence as reward signals-eliminating the need for labels, preference models, or reward engineering. Applied to Qwen2.5-Math-7B with only 16 samples per question and 10 or 20 training steps, RLSC improves accuracy by +13.4% on AIME2024, +21.2% on MATH500, +21.7% on Minerva Math, +20.8% on Olympiadbench, and +9.7% on AMC23. RLSC provides a simple, scalable post-training method for inference models, requiring only a small number of samples and unlabelled supervision.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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