Detecting RLVR Training Data via Structural Convergence of Reasoning

Hongbo Zhang, Yue Yang, Jianhao Yan, Guangsheng Bao, Yue Zhang, Yue Zhang

Detecting RLVR Training Data via Structural Convergence of Reasoning: 2 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #37 of 41 papers on 2026-02-13. Day-by-day upvote history.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is central to training modern reasoning models, but the undisclosed training data raises concerns about benchmark contamination. Unlike pretraining methods, which optimize models using token-level probabilities, RLVR fine-tunes models based on reward feedback from self-generated reasoning trajectories, making conventional likelihood-based detection methods less effective. We show that RLVR induces a distinctive behavioral signature: prompts encountered during RLVR training result in more rigid and similar generations, while unseen prompts retain greater diversity. We introduce Min-kNN Distance, a simple black-box detector that quantifies this collapse by sampling multiple completions for a given prompt and computing the average of the k smallest nearest-neighbor edit distances. Min-kNN Distance requires no access to the reference model or token probabilities. Experiments across multiple RLVR-trained reasoning models show that Min-kNN Distance reliably distinguishes RL-seen examples from unseen ones and outperforms existing membership inference and RL contamination detection baselines.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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