Hindsight-Anchored Policy Optimization: Learning Through Hindsight with Thompson Sampling-Inspired Adaptive Gating

Abstract

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards improves reasoning in large language models, yet on-policy learning often suffers from cold-start challenges in sparse-reward settings. Recent mixed-policy approaches address this by combining off-policy teacher data with on-policy training. However, simply combining these introduce a persistent off-policy gradient mass that risks training collapse and instability. To address this challenge, we propose Hindsight-Anchored Policy Optimization (HAPO), a framework that allows teacher intervention to act as a temporary support. HAPO employs Beta-Binomial confidence gating, an adaptive gating mechanism that decides when to open the gate for teacher intervention. The intervention operates with Synthetic Success Injection, which replaces the group's lowest-reward rollout with a verified teacher trajectory. We also introduce adaptive threshold annealing, which gradually retracts the support and restores on-policy training within a finite horizon to mitigate persistent off-policy drift. We demonstrate that HAPO can be layered on top of existing mixed-policy methods in a generalizable manner. Across six math reasoning benchmarks and two model scales, HAPO improves the average accuracy of three major mixed-policy methods while maintaining training stability.

Published as a conference paper ICLR 2026 CAO Workshop