Spurious Rewards Paradox: Mechanistically Understanding How RLVR Activates Memorization Shortcuts in LLMs

Lecheng Yan, Ruizhe Li, Guanhua Chen +5

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is highly effective for enhancing LLM reasoning, yet recent evidence shows models like Qwen 2.5 achieve significant gains even…