Apriel-Reasoner: RL Post-Training for General-Purpose and Efficient Reasoning

Abstract

Building general-purpose reasoning models using reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) across diverse domains has been widely adopted by frontier open-weight models. However, their training recipes and domain mixtures are often not disclosed. Joint optimization across domains poses significant challenges: domains vary widely in rollout length, problem difficulty, and sample efficiency. Further, models with long chain-of-thought traces increase inference cost and latency, making efficiency critical for practical deployment. We present Apriel-Reasoner, trained with a reproducible multi-domain RL post-training recipe on Apriel-Base, a 15B-parameter open-weight LLM, across five domains using public datasets: mathematics, code generation, instruction following, logical puzzles, and function calling. We introduce adaptive domain sampling that preserves target completed-rollout ratios despite heterogeneous rollout dynamics, and a difficulty-aware length penalty that, at no additional training overhead, encourages longer reasoning for difficult problems and shorter traces for easy ones. Trained with a strict 16K-token output budget, Apriel-Reasoner remains effective at a 32K output budget and improves over Apriel-Base on AIME 2025, GPQA, MMLU-Pro, and LiveCodeBench while producing 30-50% shorter reasoning traces. Among the evaluated open-weight models of similar scale, it improves the accuracy-token tradeoff using a fully public-data recipe.

20 pages, 4 tables, 6 figures, appendix included